


Dream of a Common Language

by westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-11
Updated: 2005-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-30 18:42:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15102689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist/pseuds/westwingfanfictioncentral_archivist
Summary: Donna recounts the story of her relationship with Josh, for a man from her past who wants to be a part of her life again.





	Dream of a Common Language

**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

**Dream of a Common Language**

**by:** Nadera

**Character(s):** Josh/Donna  
**Pairing(s):** Josh/Donna  
**Category(s):** Romance   
**Rating:** MATURE   
**Disclaimer:** yadda, yadda, yadda....  
**Summary:** Donna recounts the story of her relationship with Josh, for a man from her past who wants to be a part of her life again.  
 **Spoiler:** For just about everything up to and including the 6th season  
**Author's Note:** FEEDBACK PLEASE. This took me some time and a lot of blood and sweat to come up with – okay not really any blood and the sweat could have been because it's been hot, but you get the ides – so I'd love to hear what people think. Thanks. 

“It was about duty and loyalty and honor.”

“It was about you chasing one guy around the country after a different guy had let you down.”

She frowned and glared at her dinner companion. He wasn't getting it. She wasn't entirely sure he was ever going to get it, and she started to wonder why she had bothered to agree to met him, much less why she had agreed to tell him the story he wanted to hear. She was getting too old to defend herself to him and at some point she was going to have to give up and accept that this man was never going to be a real part of her life. 

“Duty, loyalty and honor are qualities any person can possess,” she responded. Her voice was tight and strained, but she kept her emotions in check, not letting her anger, frustration, or even sadness show. This was a discussion, a recitation of information. He'd asked and because she didn't know how to say 'no' to him she had agreed to this dinner and this conversation. But it didn't have to affect her. “They're not masculine qualities. They just get associated with men, in books and on films, television shows, and family stories. When woman are loyal it's because they have a maternal instinct. When men are loyal, it's because they have a sense of duty and honor. Women know duty in a way men never will, it just isn't called that. It wasn't about a guy. It was about duty and loyalty and honor.”

He stared back at her across the white tablecloth and raised a single eyebrow. It was smug and condescending, but it was also because he didn't have anything to say in response, and she was as equally glad to have silenced him as she was pissed that he couldn't admit he was wrong. She looked into his brown eyes but all she found in there was distance and coldness. She didn't understand how she had ever seen anything else. She couldn't fathom why still, after all these years, she kept hoping to see more. 

“Do you want to hear this or not?” she asked.

He nodded, and she noticed that his hair was now almost entirely gray. “Yes, I want to hear it.”

She leaned back in the chair, and took a drink of water. And then she began. “The point was that he was all of those things. He was smart and honest, and believed in something greater than money or power. He believed in the inherent good of people and their innate ability to change the world. He believed in doing something more with his life, and he believed he could do it – he could make the world a better place. He was steeped in honor and a sense of duty and a loyalty to people and principle that I could not help but be drawn to. So I went to New Hampshire.”

* * *

The outside of the Bartlett for America Headquarters was unimpressive. Had it not been for the banners, I would have missed it entirely, and kept walking down the street wondering where my future was. But the banners were there, and I was looking for them, and they found me. So I stopped and I stood outside and watched them blowing around in the wind. They claim that New Hampshire is cold, but I had just driven for two days from Northern Wisconsin in a car that had no heat, so I knew cold, and New Hampshire just wasn't making the cut. 

The thing about standing on the threshold of the biggest decision in your life is that you want to savor it. You want to stop and look around and take in every minute detail so that you can remember it. You could take a picture, but a picture is flat – a two-dimensional representation of a thing without any of the emotion. I wanted to remember what it felt like. I wanted to remember how it made me feel. Nervous. Trepidated. Exhilarated. Relieved. I stood there for ten minutes. It was not even 8:00 in the morning, and the number of people I could make out in the windows were minimal. Outside it was just me and the banners and the chilly wind and a swirl of emotions. When I put my hands on the door, and pulled it open, I smelled coffee and copier toner and the sweet smell of new paper. I hadn't been in school for several years by then, and I hadn't spent enough time in school libraries or coffee shops to be familiar with any of those scents, but they were for me the sweetest bouquet of smells I had ever known. 

The inside of the office was haphazard. Desks filled up most of the space, with no real partitions around them or organization in their placements. It was if someone had just stopped walking, demanded something to write on and a desk was brought in. The floors were old linoleum, like the kind you remember from grade school, and they were a light gray and brown but covered with dust and dirt and the occasional lone piece of paper. I let my foot slide for a selfish second and watched the dust swirl around. It seemed that cleaning was not a priority for them, and I liked that because it never had been for me either.

“You lost?” I heard a voice ask, and when I turned around there was an older woman, with blonde hair, glasses and a sweet but thin smile. She sounded like a school teacher, a grandmother, and a corporate CEO all at once. It was intimidating, except that I could tell she had asked out of pure concern. 

“I don't think so,” I responded. “I'm just going to go start...” I looked around the office and heard a phone ringing somewhere, “working. I'm just going to go start working.” I smiled at her and headed off towards the phone. It was in a glass alcove, and on my way through to the phone I saw a white piece of paper taped to the windows reading “Josh Lyman.” The name sounded familiar, as if I had read it or heard it before, but it didn't register much more than that. 

I reached for the phone. “Bartlett for America.” Those words from my mouth felt like a reckoning, and I felt a rush of power and purpose. The voice on the other end was asking for a meeting with Josh Lyman to discuss gun control. I knew very little about gun control and even less about Josh Lyman, but I had never felt more confident and more sure of myself in my life, and I knew I had to do this; I had to get this right. So I searched the cluttered desk until I found a day planner with Josh Lyman's name on it. “This afternoon he's got a media session and a 4:00 with finance. If you leave your name I can give him the message when he gets back.” They did. “Thank you very much.”

I hung up the phone, the planner in front of me, a pen in my hand and I was glowing. The man who I had seen out of the corner of my eye while I was on the phone said “Hi,” and when I turned around, I gave him a similiar “Hi,” while appraising his features.

I had always swooned over men. I had always had this terrible way of letting a guy determine how I was going to feel about myself, and by extension, the rest of the world. That was how I had ended up with David, and why I had stayed for two years putting him through school while hoping he would look at me the way I really wanted to be looked at. I had had enough of David, and now I had had a taste of being my own person, so I didn't flinch when I turned and looked into this new guy's face, even though my stomach began involuntary flips. I wasn't going to let this guy convince me of anything other than what I wanted, and I wasn't going to let this guy get in my way. “I'm Donna Moss,” I answered with an air of confidence I had been lacking up until three days before. And then I demanded, “Who are you?”

“Josh Lyman.”

I liked the way he said his name like he had caught me with my hand in the cookie jar and was getting off on what he presumed would be my embarrassment. I wasn't embarrassed. I had the distinct impression that I rather liked this man catching me at anything, and I smiled brightly. I suppose I should have been somewhat apologetic, having answered his phone, and given out his schedule and not have known who he was. I suppose I should have been somewhat nervous that he was going to throw me back out on the street. But I wasn't either of those things. I was resolute and determined, and I said “Ah,” like I had just made it to Final Jeopardy and found the category intriguing. “I'm your new assistant,” I declared with quick thinking.

He had crazy fly away hair. I wanted to cut it myself, just to see what he'd look like without it. And he was as disheveled as the campaign headquarters. His shirt was wrinkled, unbuttoned at the top rather loosely and the rolled up sleeves were falling to different lengths on each arm. He had dimples I could have set up shop in, and a swagger that three days before would have made me swoon like a teenager. I was not a teenager anymore, and he was the first guy I met who struck me as an adult. He was older, more mature, focused, and passionate. And I remember thinking, as I followed him around convincing him to let me stay that if he was this impressive, Governor Bartlett must be something of a demigod. 

The thing was I wasn't attracted to Josh at first, not really. I found him attractive yes, and I found him admirable. But I found everyone working on the campaign admirable, from C.J. to Toby. They all had such dedication, not just to the Governor, but to the issues they believed in. There was a youthful idealistic vigor surrounding us, and I got caught up in it as much as any of them. I was inspired to be something better than I had thought I could, and I fell in love with that feeling. But I did not fall in love with Josh Lyman. 

He was, for one thing, annoying. He was cute when he was doing it, and after awhile he'd stop and apologize, but for the most part he was annoying. Annoying and demanding, and egotistical. We spent those first weeks establishing a rhythm, a style of banter, and an ease that surprised us both. The more arrogant he was, the more confident I became in rebuffing his ego. It was after two weeks as if we had been working together for years and had known each other for even longer. In a childish school girl kind of a way I was smitten with him, but I wasn't a childish school girl anymore and I didn't explore the feelings, or consider the possibility that he reciprocated them. I liked being a part of the campaign and feeling like a professional, and that was what I started to take seriously, nothing else. 

There were, besides, still the thoughts of David. It was hardest in the morning when I would wake up in a bed by myself – a feeling I hadn't gotten used to after two years of waking up with him there. It was hardest in the morning when I had dreamed about him the night before, even though I never intended to. Sometimes someone would tell a story that reminded me of him, or we'd pass a state park and I'd remember hiking with him. Once Margaret shut a door on her finger and needed to be taken to the hospital, and sitting in the waiting room, he was all I could think about. I wondered what he was doing and if he cared at all that I had left. I wondered if he was with someone else, if he'd done well on the exam he'd been studying for the week I moved out, or if he was making rent on his own. Mostly I wondered why I still bothered thinking about him at all. 

Then, about a month into my working on the campaign, I had a new reason to think about him. 

* * *

“Your dinner,” the waiter said in a thick French accent.

She looked up, and shook her head to clear the cobwebs. Her storytelling had taken her far away from the evening and the restaurant and her dinner companion, and she was surprised to find the plate placed in front of her. She looked across the table at her companion and noticed the way he smiled and inhaled the warm aroma of his meal. It was a simple gesture, but something about it annoyed her. He took so much pleasure in this food, but none of that attention had ever been directed at her. Even then, she felt like a fool wanting so desperately for him to notice her. 

When the waiter was gone, he looked over expectantly. “Are you going to keep telling me?” he asked, as if he was confused as to why she had stopped in the first place.

“Let's just eat.”

“No, please,” he insisted and like the fool she was, she found herself giving in to his demands, just like she always did. “I want to hear this.”

She hesitated. “Some of this is...well, personal. Do you really want to hear the real details of what happened? I could sum it up a lot shorter and we'd be done by dessert.”

He shook his head from side to side emphatically. “I want to know every detail, no holding back. This is the only story I've really wanted to hear. You wouldn't deny the only request of your old...”

“Don't,” she stopped him coarsely. “Don't even say it. I'll tell you, but don't guilt me and let's not pretend we're something we're not.”

He looked hurt, his face had fallen slightly, and she thought she saw a spark of emotion in his otherwise dull eyes. But if she had, in a second it was gone. He nodded. “It's your story,” he agreed. “You tell it how you want.” 

She nodded, and pushed her food around with her fork as she continued.

* * *

It was a Friday in February when I figured it out. A Friday spent on a bus ride back to New Hampshire after some stops in the South. Everyone around me was happy. After South Carolina the campaign was taking off. We had money and publicity and a legitimate chance to do more than just force Hoynes to discuss issues he wouldn't have otherwise. On the bus there was complaining that we had to go back to the cold, but even in their complaints, people's voices were laced with excitement and energy. It was a good time for everyone, and they were alive with a sense of purpose. I sat in the back and tried to ignore them. I had a calender in my lap, and I had been counting days over and over again, trying to convince myself that it was a mistake. That things like this didn't happen once you decide to become a strong, independent woman. 

“Looking for time off?”

I turned my face and saw Josh standing in the aisle, leaning against the front of my seat. “Huh?”

He pointed to the calender in my lap. “Are you looking for time off?”

I looked down in my lap, and realized what he meant. I slammed the calender shut quickly, afraid that somehow it exposed me, gave away the secret I was just now coming to terms with. “No,” I said trying to hide my nerves with defiance. “Of course not.”

He made a face like he either wasn't buying it or he just thought I was strange. Then he pushed me slightly so I would take the hint to scoot over to the window seat. I did, putting the calender away in my bag as I moved, and he took the seat next to me, leaning back into the blue upholstery, and extending his legs into the aisle. 

“Well you've got it,” he said with a smile. 

I had, for the most part, always been a good girl, who didn't keep secrets or hide things. Paranoia was thus new for me, but I was getting the hang of it rather quickly. “I've got what?” I squeaked out, losing the battle to control my nerves. 

He made a face again, and this time kept it as he stared at me, scanning my face for some insight into my behavior. I tried to look away, but there weren't many places for my eyes to go. “Time off,” he said slowly, still analyzing my facial expressions and not doubt looking for a reaction. “When we get back to the office, everyone's taking this Saturday off. The Governor and Leo are going to the Governor's home. Even Toby's flying back to D.C. to see his wife.” I let out a sigh of relief. And then blushed when Josh leaned forward and stared harder. “What's with you?”

I shrugged and pushed him out of my personal space. “Just glad to have the time off,” I covered. I was glad to the have the time off, I just wasn't glad that I already knew how it was going to be spent.

“So you going to go back to cheeseland?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “It's America's dairyland, not cheeseland, and why would I go back?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe to see people. Isn't there anyone who misses you?”

It was a simple question, but at that moment it ripped me to pieces. Whatever confidence and self-assurance I had developed up till then started to crumble, and I could feel tears welling inside me. If I hadn't been so tired from campaigning, if I hadn't just discovered the worst news I could have gotten, I would have been able to hold my own. But I was tired and I had discovered the worst news, and I wasn't able to hold my own, so I turned away and looked out the window, so that when the first tear fell down my cheek, it at least didn't fall in front of him. 

I cried quietly. I always have. It's one of my better qualities, and one I've perfected over time. I cry quietly. It was a relief at the time, to not break out in sobs or gasps while I rode on the bus, my boss sitting next to me. He would never have even known I was upset, except that he reached a hand over and turned my face to look at him. I remained quiet, and in some ways resolute, but my eyes were sad and my cheeks were wet and when I saw the pain fall across his face, it only made it harder to stop crying.

“You're crying,” he whispered to me. He scooted closer to me, as if to offer me some privacy from the rest of the bus. It meant his thigh was pressed against mine, and I found the contact comforting. I pushed against it, needing to feel his weight on me. We couldn't hug on the back of a bus filled with our co-workers, and I couldn't let him hold me, so I took what physical comfort he could offer. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head, but didn't speak. What was there to say? I was crying, that was enough. It was more than I would have given him otherwise, and it was all I was going to give him at the time. I had boundaries now. I wasn't going to let some guy swoop in and try to take care of me anymore. And I definetly wasn't going to let that guy be my boss, even if he was the closest thing I had to a friend in those days. 

“Is this about Wisconsin?” he asked, and the concern in his voice became as comforting to me as the feel of his leg next to mine. I shook my head and hoped he wouldn't ask anymore questions. It didn't work. It never did. “Is this about your stupid ex-boyfriend?” I smiled slightly at Josh's obvious disdain for David, but the smile faded when I remembered that sadly, it was about him. Still, I shook my head. “Is this about...”

I raised my hand and pressed a finger to Josh's mouth. I shook my head back and forth and stared resolutely at his eyes, willing him to finally understand. He stared at me and then after a moment or two he nodded slowly. I lifted my finger off his mouth, and let it trail slowly down the side of his cheek and then off his chin. His skin was smooth and soft, with only the hint of stubble. I smiled softly at him, my eyes and heart too heavy for anything else, and then I dropped my hand, took hold of his and turned and looked back out the window.

For once he said nothing. He understood and I needed that. We spent the rest of the bus ride sitting like that, until a few hours outside Nashua when he slumped over on my shoulder and began to snore quietly. 

The thing about politics at the national level, is that it's all in the abstract. You reduce people to polls and statistics. You know there's some guy in middle Ohio working a typical blue collar job at some auto plant, making about $40,000 a year, and he's got two kids and a wife and a dog and he goes to church on Sundays, and you know that if you sign a free trade deal, the company's going to open a plant in Mexico or the Virgin Islands were there's no OSHA and no EPA and no minimum wage laws, and that after a year or so, the plant in Ohio is going to start instituting layoffs, and even if that guy in middle Ohio survives through layouts, a year later the whole plant's going to close, and he's still going to be without a job. And you know that. You know that if you propose this legislation, if you support that deal, if you pass whatever law, some guy in Ohio is going to lose his job. But there are other guys in other states who are going to benefit from that deal, they're going to get raises, and it's going to cost less to get a car, and some guy who could never afford one before will suddenly be able to get it. And you know if you don't sign it, some guy's going to lose his job anyway to an illegal immigrant who cannot enforce minimum wage laws or OSHA violations without getting deported. So what do you do? You weigh the statistics, you look at polls to determine popular support and you make a decision. And you try not to wonder if your decision would be different if you knew that the guy in Ohio is named Nathan and that he married his high school sweetheart Cara, and had two kids, Mike and Eleanor, and that Mike has the best grades in his school and wants to go to M.I.T. and Cara is all-American on her swim team and wants to try for the Olympics, and that every Thursday night is pizza and game night because they're one of those families that actually likes to spend time together. 

If I only knew one thing about feminism, outside of being a card carrying member, I knew that the personal was political. What I couldn't wrestle with was when the political got personal. I didn't sleep that Friday night when we got back to New Hampshire and I was in my small but comfortable hotel room. I didn't sleep because I was sitting up thinking about the personal and the political, and where I was going to end up. So there I was, Donnatella Moss, finally embarked on my future, finally feeling like I was part of something good, and I had just found out for $10.75 at the RiteAid on the corner that I was carrying my past around in my uterus.

I believed in a woman's right to choose. I believed in my right to decide what was best for me. I believed I was young and alone and without a real job or any financial support. I believed if I told my mother what I was considering she would never speak to me again. I believed that she was the only family I had. I also believed that a Bartlett for America staffer having an abortion mid-campaign was the kind of thing that dashes dreams of the presidency. The thing about being pregnant, even in those first few moments, is that you really do start to think in terms of two. The decision isn't about what's right for you, it's never like that. The decision is about what's right for both of you. Was I really able to provide for a child? Was I really capable of being a mother? Was this the right time? Did I even have the right to ask that question?

I sat in the hotel chair by the window the whole night, staring out the window of the fifth floor room into the trees that lined the back of the building. I watched the sun start to creep up around seven and recognized that it was becoming morning. The Planned Parenthood opened at eleven on Saturday, I had already called and listened to their answering machine twice, making a note of how to get there and what their hours were all while deciding if I should get in my car and drive two states over to make sure no one saw me. In the end I opted against it. I could always claim I was getting birth control, or even scouring up endorsements. I was pretty sure no one was going to pay attention to what I was doing. I was an assistant to a staff whose candidate was only just starting to get real media attention. To say I was insignificant was an understatement. To say no one would notice was my own mistake.

It wasn't even 8:00 when there was a knock on my door. I started to wonder if all my really big decisions in life would be made in the moments leading up to 8:00 in the morning. It could have been anyone really, but I wasn't the least bit surprised to see Josh on the other side of the door. He gave me a hopeful smile and then stepped past me into the room. I watched him walk in, take one look at the bed which was still made and had never been slept in, one look back to me to confirm that I was in fact still wearing the same clothes as the day before and then heard him sigh. 

I shut the door and walked past him back to my chair. There was no point in putting on airs for him. I was what I was – depressed, confused and unashamed by both. 

We sat in silence at first. I continued looking out the window. He took a seat behind my on the bed because there really wasn't anywhere else to sit. I could still see his reflection in the glass of the window, even though the sun was getting brighter and it made his image start to fade. I decided I liked the way he looked fading out, like this was some kind of independent film that would get critical reviews for its postmodern critique of identity but fail at the box office. I liked the idea of my life as a movie. It made everything feel less real, and I was struck with the thought that I could walk off set whenever I wanted and stop being this person. I fantasized about what the movie soundtrack would sound like, and how they would capture its meaning in a single poster, and all the other things one does to distance themselves from reality. I was always a good person, I kept thinking to myself. Things weren't supposed to turn out like this.

“You going to tell me what's wrong?” he finally asked. 

“I'm pregnant,” I said without hesitation or emotion. I thought confessing it would have been cathartic, but the truth was I felt nothing. I felt no inclination to cry or defend myself or explain the circumstances to him, or offer up a proposal for how I was going to deal with it. I could have just as easily told him that I liked zucchini.

He didn't say anything at first, which I could have predicted. If I was him I wouldn't have known what to say either. I was me, I was the one pregnant and I had spent the past ten hours unable to come up with anything to say. Eventually he asked, “Is it Dr. Freeride's?”

I hated that he asked that. To me, what guy's sperm had made me pregnant was the least important part of the situation. What did it matter? Would it somehow change my condition? Would it make it easier for me to make a decision? Would my pregnancy be any better or worse if it was some guy's over another's? It's not his, I thought with annoyance. It's mine. It's my body, and my situation, and my choice, and whether you think the guy has a say in it or not, I was the one who was going to have to deal with. “No,” I finally responded curtly. “It's Kevin's, who sorts the mail.”

“What?!” he shouted, standing up from the bed, and walking towards me. I watched him in the window with narrowed angry eyes.

“Wait, maybe it's Robert's in the press office,” I deadpanned. He was standing to my side now, and I turned my head from the window to look at him. He looked too real without the glass to mediate, so I turned back away. “I'm not a slut, Josh. I've been on the campaign for four weeks. Of course it's David's.”

When I turned back to look at him, he was leaning against the wall, with his arms crossed and his shoulders slumped. “I didn't mean it like that.” 

I looked at him, and realized that this was the first time in the past month I'd ever seen Joshua Lyman uncertain. It made me sad to think that I had affected this man that I idolized for his strength and conviction. I hadn't meant to become such a significant part of someone else's life so soon, and certainly not a guy who would care enough about me to feel sad or hurt or unsure in my presence. This wasn't what I had left Wisconsin for. I turned away from him and looked into my lap, taking a sudden interest in the edge of my shirt, where the seam was coming undone. 

“I'm sorry,” I told him as I played with my shirt and avoided making eye contact. “I know you didn't mean it. I guess I'm just a little...” I shrugged my shoulders and waved my hand in the air to think of the right word. All I came up with was “...off.” 

He moved then, and walked around until he was standing in front of me, blocking my view of the window. He smiled sadly at me, but it was a smile filled with concern, and I remembered how much comfort he had given me on the bus the night before. I wasn't sure why I wouldn't let him comfort me there in the hotel room. My head felt like a repository of conflicting thoughts, and I tried to smile back at him, but it came out lackluster.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. 

I looked up at him with a furrowed brow. “How am I feeling?” I echoed. It was too odd a question to ask and too confusing to answer. 

He leaned against the window. “I'm sorry, Donna. The truth is I'm not sure what to say here. I want to say the right thing, and do the right thing so I can help, or just be whatever you need right now. But, god, I don't know what you need and I don't know how to be it.”

It was quite possibly the most honest thing a man had ever said to me. It was quite possible the most honest thing another human being had every said to me. I felt myself open up to him, and for the first time in a month, I didn't stop myself. “That,” I said rubbing my lips together when I realized how hard it was going to be to talk honestly with him. “That was pretty good, what you said there.” He smiled and I ran a hand through my hair. “The truth is I don't know what to say either, Josh. It's not your problem, and it's not your business, and it shouldn't even be on your radar. To make matters worse, you're my boss, and you're running a presidential campaign, and you're right that this isn't the place for personal problems. I wasn't going to tell you, but you showed up and you were here and the real truth is that you're the only thing I have right now that even comes close to being a friend.”

He stared at me with his comforting smile and I stared back and it felt the way I had always wanted my relationships to feel – like we were two people who really listened to each other, and really respected each other, and really wanted the best for each other, without judgment or selfishness. 

“I'm glad I'm you're friend,” he said, and I let out a tired laugh, that of all the things I'd said, that was the one he responded to first. He smiled wider and then ran his own hand through his hair. “And it is my problem, Donna, because you are my friend, and because you did tell me and because I'm glad you did.”

We let the silence and our two smiles settle over the room again. He arched his eyebrow and nodded toward the bed and I silently agreed with my own nod before getting up and joining him there. I laid back on the hard mattress relieved to be stretching out my legs and he laid next to me. We looked up at the ceiling together and began to talk. 

“Would it be horrible if I asked the obvious question?”

“Who the father was, wasn't obvious?” I asked sarcastically.

“True enough.”

I sighed. “You want to know what I plan to do.”

“I'm not saying you should have a plan already. I just thought if you had some thoughts, I'd like to hear them.”

“My only real plan was to go to Planned Parenthood today. Get an official test done, ask some questions, get some information.”

“Way to spend your day off.” he commented. I smirked in response. “Hey,” he said suddenly, turning on his side to look at me. I turned my head and watched him. “You knew this yesterday. On the bus. That's why you...”

I gave him a half smile for being smart and then looked back at the ceiling. “I suspected as much. I didn't officially now till we got back last night and took a pregnancy test.”

He spoke slowly when he did. “So when I brought up people back in Wisconsin, that was pretty stupid, huh?”

I turned and looked at him. “You couldn't have known. It was sweet of you to be interested in what I was doing.”

He nodded and rolled back on his back. “To be honest, I was asking cause I was going to see if you wanted to spend your day off with me.”

I laughed at the irony. “Boy did you pick the wrong staffer to spend your down time with. I'm guessing I'll be about as fun as a Republican fundraiser today.”

“They can be fun if you sneak in and heckle the speakers.”

“Why do I have a feeling that you speak from experience?”

“I was young.”

“When was this?”

“Two months ago.” I laughed despite myself. “Besides,” he continued. “I really did want to hang out with you today, and I'm even more glad if it means I can be a support for you...”

“If you finish that sentence with 'in your time of need', I'm going to get irate again. My cat didn't die Josh, I'm pregnant. You want to spend the day with me deciding whether or not I should have an abortion?”

“That's a little harsh, don't you think?” He said turning to look at me again. This time his face and voice lacked concern. I realized that he wasn't going to let me push him away despite my best effortst to do so, and I was grateful. 

But I chose to test him anyway. “This is harsh.”

“Yes.” He said resolutely. I liked the way he could take a stand while lying on his back next to me in a crappy hotel room.

“Yes what?”

“Yes I want to spend the day with you deciding whether or not you should have an abortion.”

I turned on my side and looked at him, surprised by his words and the veracity with which he said them. I couldn't remember the last time anyone had stood by me so completely and with such determination. I could never remember a time a guy had ever done that. To say that I had a history of being let down by male figures in my life was an understatement. David had just been the final in a long list of men starting with my birth. But Josh was different. I had taken off looking for my future, looking for something better, something that was about me, and I had found it. And it was laying next to me willing to be there for me because I needed it, and I wanted it, and he wasn't going to get anything but my gratitude in return. 

“Can I confess something?” I asked him. He turned over on his side as well so we were facing each other and nodded. “I like that you don't let me get away with things. I like that you call me out on my bullshit.”

He smiled. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

Josh decided the first thing to do was get some food. I resisted the urge to make a crack about pregnant women eating for two, and we walked down the street to a local diner that promised the best french toast in the State. On the way Josh told me a story about his dad's obsession with yard work and squirrels. I liked the way he was making an effort to lighten my spirits without being superficial. I liked the way he talked about his dad. I didn't like the way it made me jealous, the way I envied that kind of relationship. But that was just another thing Josh didn't know about me yet, so it wasn't his fault that I didn't really like being reminded of father figures or my lack there of. It also wasn't his fault that I had started to interpret everything through my pregnancy. His story became a question about where my baby's father would be in its life. The couple in the booth across from us became a question about whether I could raise a child alone. The tired waitress with sad eyes became a question about how I was going to support the both of us. Josh paying the check became a question about how I was going to afford even the medical bills to have a child. 

These were the personal parts of the decision that didn't get talked about. Abortion had became a moral issue, so steeped in religion and absolutism, so consumed with the scientific and theological justifications for when a fetus becomes something else, that I didn't know where in the debate I got the chance to say: I want to love this child. I want to give this child everything they deserve. But I don't want to be on welfare my whole life, and I don't want to have to jump through bureaucratic hoops so my child can get the food I'm supposed to provide but which I can't because politicians keep restricting eligibility for food stamps, and I have to choose between a better job and no help or help and a bad job. I didn't know where I got to say that it didn't feel right. That I couldn't do this right now, but it didn't mean I was a bad person. It didn't mean I loved any less than anyone else, or that I was never going to be the right kind of mother. 

I was quiet through most of breakfast, and Josh seemed to accept it. He continued telling stories, and I laughed when I felt like it, and stared out the window when I didn't. He never complained. Once, when I hadn't said anything for awhile, he reached over and squeezed my hand reassuringly. I looked over at him and smiled. I wondered why they didn't have guys like this in Wisconsin, and then figured it was probably because he had been busy growing up on the East coast. 

When we left the diner he lingered by the door, and I took his hesitation for what it was: uncertainty of where to go next. I headed in the direction of the clinic, and he took my lead and walked with me. 

“You're Jewish,” I half-asked, half-said.

“Yeah.”

“I'm Protestant.”

“Very religious?”

“No. My mother is. Very.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You're not very religious?”

He shrugged. “I can Shabbat with the best of them, but I've never considered myself really religious. Being Jewish is a cultural thing for me more than a certain relationship with God. Religion is a complicated and messy thing, and in politics it has a habit of making things worse. I guess I've always had a healthy skepticism towards organized religion.” He paused. “But never tell my parents I said that.” I laughed. “What about you?”

I sighed. “Organized religion has never really been for me, either. When I was young, after my...” I trailed off and then corrected myself. “When I was young, my mother got really active in our church. The church really became her primary family. She needed it. She needed to feel like she was a part of something and that there was a higher power that was going to explain everything that happened in her life and was going to make it okay no matter how bad it got. She always said I was too stubborn and selfish to really accept God in my life.” I shrugged. “I guess she was right.” I gave him a reluctant smile to show that I wasn't upset by it. “I know I believe in something,” I confessed. “I'm just not sure what it is, or what role it has in my life.”

He nodded and smiled back at me. “But you still call yourself Protestant?” he asked. “Is that like a cultural thing too?”

I made a face and laughed. “No. That's like saying being white is a culture. Protestant is just another generic branch of Christianity. There's nothing unique about it that stays with me. I guess I just call myself that out of habit. The way I still say I'm from Wisconsin even though I don't live there anymore. I imagine I'll never really live there again, but I'll still keep saying I'm from Wisconsin.”

“The past has a funny way of affecting the future,” he commented, and his words struck me as something I had been feeling deeply for the past month. I nodded and let out a long sigh. He smiled and put his arm around me, squeezing me against himself for a second before letting go. 

“We have to talk about something,” I said quickly, slowing my pace. He paused and slowed down as well. “In about two blocks we're going to be at the Planned Parenthood clinic and...”

“And you're worried about what it looks like for two of Bartlett's campaign staff to go in together.” I nodded. “You really think anyone's watching?”

“I really think that shouldn't be the determining factor.”

He thought for a second and nodded. “I'm not going to lie to you, I don't like the idea of it either. Not the least of which is because as far as everyone else is concerned, I am your boss.”

“I agree. The last thing I want is for it to look like you have some pivotal role in this.”

He hesitated and made a face. “I know all that, but I really don't want you to do this alone, and I really don't think anyone is watching. C'mon, there's no media to speak of, and everyone else working on the campaign has taken off for the weekend. We're practically the only people in the city who's even heard of Jed Bartlett.”

“Isn't this the state he's Governor of?”

“Okay, so maybe we're not the only people who's heard of him. But we are probably the only people who have ever heard of Josh Lyman or Donna Moss.”

“Wait. I want to make a mental note of this rare moment where you recognize how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of things.”

He laughed and gently pushed me in the shoulder. “Don't kid yourself, I'm a giant. A man among men. The people in this hick town are just too simple minded to see that..”

“You do listen to yourself sometimes when you talk don't you?”

He laughed again, “Seriously, Donna. This doesn't have to be a big deal. We can go in there together. You'll go in the back and get checked out and I'll sit in the waiting room and read pamphlets about women's reproductive organs.”

I couldn't help but smile at him. He was sweet and kind and too good for his own well-being. “As charming as that sounds, no. No, Josh. It's a phenomenally bad idea and you know it.” He made a face and then nodded, accepting reason back into the discussion. “I'm gonna be fine,” I reassured him. 

“You'll meet me afterwards.” I nodded. “Is an hour enough time?”

“Probably.”

He ran a hand through his hair. “There's a bookstore on Main, you know where it is?” I nodded. “Why don't you meet me there, when you're done.”

“I don't have my cellphone to call if it takes longer.”

He shook his head. “Doesn't matter. I'll wait there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah c'mon, me and a bookstore, it's like a match made in heaven.” I shot him a quizzical look. “Okay, I plan to read the sports pages of all the major newspapers. Give me a break.”

I smiled brightly at him. “Thanks,” I told him with as much strength as I could manage at the time. I reached over and took his hand briefly. He squeezed mind and smiled brightly, flashing me the dimples that I had come to love as so characteristically Josh. And then he turned and headed down the street away from me, and I turned and headed back up the street towards the clinic.

There's always been something about a Planned Parenthood office that makes me proud to be a woman. I've frequented them all over the great state of Wisconsin, either for my own purposes or as a supportive friend for someone else. When my mom was too devout to talk to me about sex, Planned Parenthood was nice enough to explain birth control. When my health insurance was canceled and I needed a check up, Planned Parenthood was nice enough to provide a pap smear at reduced cost. There's something about stepping into a Planned Parenthood that makes me feel like I am really taking advantage of the legal rights women before me worked so amazingly hard to secure. There's something about it that makes me grateful to Margaret Sanger, and strong in the face of wavering support of Roe v. Wade, and diligent in my feminist beliefs. Planned Parenthood has this way of reminding me that women can change the world by being women. 

I wasn't entirely sure the nurse who took my blood felt the same way, but I attributed her sullen attitude to having to work on Saturday and turned my intention to the Doctor who was talking to me about my options. It was nice to feel that I was surrounded by women who supported me, even though technically they couldn't tell me what the right thing to do was, and I hadn't made a decision yet for them to support. The blood test came back as positive and the Doctor finished answering all my questions. And then, just as I was getting ready to go, she asked me the question I didn't want to hear: Have you told the father yet?

On my walk to the bookstore, it became the only thing I thought about. I was so caught up in it that I walked past the bookstore on purpose and took another turn around the block. It wasn't like David and I had spoken since I left. It wasn't like he'd made any attempt to contact me, though my mother knew where I was, and I wasn't hard to track down. I didn't think I wanted to tell him. I didn't think I wanted to have anything to do with him. I had just gotten used to being without him. I had just started to dream about other things at night. I had just started to watch ER without thinking about him. I didn't know what he'd say, but in the back of mind I started to get the nagging sensation that he should at least have the chance to say something.

On my second time around I finally went in the bookstore. I found Josh in the back, draped over a leather chair with the Washington Post open in front of him. He couldn't see me behind it, and I sat down in the chair next to his quietly. I watched him as he read, and realized that I really liked his arms. He had these great arms that were deceptively strong and warm. He wasn't a big guy, but he wasn't small. He was just right, and I felt like Goldilocks having found the porridge I liked best. 

Without meaning to, I began to compare him to David. They were such different people. It was like good and evil, except Josh wasn't perfect and David wasn't all bad. I started to think, if this was Josh's child, would he still have been the first person, the only person, that I told? Would I have wanted to know his opinion? Would I have wanted to reach the same decision as him? Would I have wanted his support, and his comfort and his presence? Would I have felt like I owed it to him to tell him? I decided yes, to all of it. 

“Would you want to know?” I asked out loud.

The paper dropped from his hands and he looked over at me with surprise. “Did you just get here?” I shrugged. “I didn't hear you.”

“I said...”

“No, I mean, I didn't hear you sit down.” I shrugged again. I noticed that as in sync as we were with each other, Josh had a tendency to fixate on things I found irrelevant. What did it matter when I had sat down next to him? I had.

I started to repeat the question. “Would you...”

“Yes.” He looked at me, his eyes steady and calm. “Yes.”

“Even if it was someone you didn't want to be with?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it was someone you didn't love?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it was me?”

“Especially yes.”

“What would you want to do?”

He shook his head. “That part I don't know.”

I nodded and turned away to look at the rows of books. There were so many stories in that one room, so many different characters and different situations and different ways for them to turn out. In the sea of them I couldn't figure out my own, and I didn't like the direction it was taking.

He folded the paper meticulously and then set it on the coffee table between our two chairs. “I got you a present,” he said, and from behind his chair he produced a blue bag. 

I turned toward him and smiled with surprise. “You got me a present?” He shrugged and handed me the bag. I felt myself blush and despite everything, a wave of giddy excitement filled my body. I was a sucker for presents. Inside the bag was a book, and I pulled it out slowly with reverence. It was thin with a teal cover and I turned it over in my hands and gasped. “You bought me an Adrienne Rich book,” I said with awe and reverence. 

The Dream of a Common Language was in my hands and I wanted to cry all over its front cover. How could I not love Adrienne Rich? How could I not have loved her from the first time I stood up to my grade school teacher and said that 'mankind' didn't include me and he should stop saying it? I knew this book well, had considered stealing it from the UW library on more than one occasion, but had for some reason never bought it for myself. At that moment, I knew why. I was waiting. I was waiting for the right person to buy it for me. 

“I can't believe..” I stumbled over my words. “You..and Adrienne Rich?”

Josh smirked at me. “I'm more than just an arrogant politician,” he said ruefully. I made a face at him to show that that wasn't what I meant. “Besides,” he said. “It made me think of you, and how you don't put up with my bullshit, and how much, for once, I appreciate that.”

I opened the book, and methodically turned the pages until I reached the section I knew by heart, and read out loud to him. “Language cannot do everything – chalk it on the walls where the dead poets lie in their mausoleums If at the will of the poet the poem could turn into a thing a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head alight with dew If it could simply look you in the face with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn till you, and I who long to make this thing, were finally clarified together in its stare.” I closed my eyes and then the book and sighed deeply. When I opened my eyes again, Josh was staring at me with a soft sweet smile.

“You really are quite beautiful,” he said simply.

I smiled. “You really are quite wonderful,” I replied.

It was his turn to sigh a deep resolute sigh that I suspected held more for him than I could decipher. I didn't try to make it out, it was his sigh, and I would leave him to it. 

“You want to?” he asked after awhile pointing toward the door. I nodded, and we stood up and walked out of the store together, back onto the streets. He seemed to know where he was going, and I had finished with my plans for the day, so I followed without protest or concern. 

It was March and still chilly, but the sun was out and compared to the past few weeks, it was getting warm. I didn't mind the walk. I needed to feel like I was doing something. 

“Your appointment went well?” he asked as we walked.

“I'm not sure how we're defining 'well' in the given circumstances. It went as expected.”

“So still...”

“Yep, still.”

He nodded. “Were you able to get all your questions answered?”

I thought about it. “No,” I answered. He stopped and looked at me with concern. “There are some questions I need other people to answer.” He nodded and kept walking.

“Did you ask me about religion earlier because you thought I'd think you were wrong if...well, if you decided one thing as opposed to the other?”

I shrugged. “I don't think I really thought you'd think it was wrong, or that I was a bad person. But I was curious. I was curious about something other than your political stance on the issue.”

“I wouldn't think that, you know. I would never.”

I reached over and placed my hand on his arm. “I know, Josh. I told you, I didn't think you would.” He regarded me for a second and then nodded. He took my hand in his, and we kept walking down the street. “I was really good at Chemistry,” I told him.

“Oh yeah?”

“I liked it. Most of my friends in high school really struggled with it, but not me. I took it twice. I took Honors Chemistry and then the year after I took AP Chemistry. If I could have taken some super AP College level Chemistry after that I would have.”

“Was that one of your fifty majors?”

“No, I never really got around to it in college. I was going to and then Da...then someone talked me out of it.”

He let my backtracking go without comment and started to swing our arms back and forth like a child. “Why'd you like Chemistry?”

“It was all formulas. All you had to do was memorize the formulas, then figure out which ones applied when, plug in the right information and you got your answer. In chemistry things always had answers and there was always a way to figure them out. If you combine this element with that element under these conditions, then this one thing is going to happen, and as long as nothing changes, it's always gonna happen like that. I liked Chemistry. I was really good at it.”

He smiled. “Life's not really like chemistry, is it?”

I smiled, and started to think that Josh and I had more than just a dream of a common language. “No,” I agreed. “Which is ironic, when you consider how life began and all.”

“It's true chemistry's pretty important.”

“I can't help but think sometimes that life is like chemistry and if I only figure out the right formula, I'll figure out what to do.”

“There's no formula for this one, Donna.”

I looked up at him with sad eyes. “Are you sure?”

He stopped walking and looked back at me with equally sad eyes. “This time, I am.” He squeezed my hand and then let it go. “We're here,” he said with a smile. I turned and looked and we were standing in front of the Nashua Symphony Association, home of the Nashua Symphony Orchestra. “Don't look so surprised,” he said as he held the door open.

“I don't understand, is the symphony playing on a Saturday afternoon?” He laughed and ushered me inside. I noticed him nod to a man at a desk to the left of the lobby and then kept walking across the plush red carpet to the double doors that lead to the auditorium.

“I like coming here when I need to get away from the campaign, when I just need a place to think.” I smiled at him, as he guided me into the auditorium and to a row of seats. “I like being here,” he said as we sat back in the red chairs, the empty stage laid out in front of us. “It makes me feel close...” he hesitated. “It reminds me of what's important and what's not.”

I sighed and sunk into the comfy chair, letting all my frustration float away. I leaned my head back and shut my eyes. “Thank you,” I whispered to him. 

He reached over and took my hand in his. “It's also nice and private here,” he offered. “Say if someone wanted to have a private, personal conversation about something.”

I laughed, as I sat there, with my head back and eyes closed. I liked feeling this comfortable with him, to sit there completely exposed and vulnerable, holding his hand and carrying someone else's child. This was the stuff of Lifetime movies, I thought, only neither of us were the least bit melodramatic. We were, if anything, underplaying it all. 

“I just keep thinking,” I confessed to him, “that I'm a good person. That this is supposed to happen to someone other than me.”

“Good people get pregnant too, Donna. Good people decide to have abortions too. Nothing about this has anything to do with whether you're a good person or not.”

“I didn't say it was a rational thought,” I mumbled. I didn't open my eyes but I pictured him smiling at me. 

“When you said there were questions you need other people to answer, where any of those people me?”

“What would it look like to have a Bartlett for America staffer have an abortion mid-campaign?”

“No one would ever find out, Donna. Those documents are private, and no one's watching. We could do it before it even occurred to anyone to ask questions.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“You can't make this decision based on what's right for the campaign.”

“Josh,” I said, my voice getting tense. I finally leaned my head up and opened my eyes, directing them sternly at him. “Don't start coddling me now.”

He regarded me with uncertainty then nodded. “It would like bad.” He sighed. “You're my assistant, you're not just a regular staffer. You have direct interaction with the people shaping the campaign and issues. It would turn into something bigger than it should be, bigger than it would be if you just handed out flyers. It would look especially bad if I was in any way involved.” 

“It's bullshit,” I mumbled. “I have every right.”

“It is bullshit,” he agreed. 

“And you're pro-choice,” I added with more frustration. “You campaign for my right to make this choice, so long as what, I don't actually decide to do it?”

He sighed. “It is bullshit,” he repeated. “But you wanted the truth, and the truth is that it's bullshit that could become a story that we don't want to deal with.” I groaned and leaned my head back. “Look,” he continued. “I meant it that I don't think it's going to turn into a story. I don't think anyone is ever going to find out. And I really don't think that it should impact your decision one way or the other.”

“I know it seems unlikely that people will find out, but say they do. Say someone finds out that Josiah Bartlett's paychecks go to funding someone's abortion. I know you're the political professional, but even I can see how that story would get spun out of control.”

“So you're going to decide to have a child because you don't want to jeopardize the longshot presidential chances of a guy you don't know and a campaign you've only been a part of for four weeks?” His voice was getting high and insistent. It was starting to sound the way it did when he was in staff meetings, or talking to Toby. 

“Don't yell,” I admonished him. “It's not the only concern I have, you know. But yeah, it matters to me. If I'd only been working on the campaign for two days it would matter to me. If I'd only known you for two days it would matter to me.”

“Me? What does that have to do with it? I'm not the one running...” he stopped talking and stared at me. I looked away because I didn't like what he seemed to gleam from my face. “You're more worried about how this will make me look, aren't you?”

I looked away at the stage and avoided his eyes. “Maybe you're not worried enough.”

“Maybe you're too worried about other people and not enough about yourself.”

I turned back and looked at him, his words stinging me in a way he couldn't understand. He was right, this was supposed to be about me. The new Donna was supposed to do what was right for herself, what was best for her, not what she thought would be best for some guy. “It doesn't mean I'd have the baby,” I said in a small voice.

He stared at me and then turned away to face the same stage I'd retreated to earlier. “But you'd leave.” 

I let the words hang in the air above us. It was the one conclusion I had come to all day. It was what I had first considered sitting in the hotel room looking out the window on the world. It was what made the most sense when I was pushing my uneaten french toast around its plate and half-listening to Josh's stories. It was what I had determined was best when I walked to the bookstore and hesitated going inside. It was what I was still thinking as we sat there together in the empty Symphony Hall, with no music playing. 

“Are you going to go back to him?”

“No.”

“But you're going to go see him, aren't you?”

I watched Josh as he talked, still staring ahead at the stage. A coldness had come over him, a distance we hadn't had between us since the first day we met. It broke my heart in a way David never had, and I couldn't understand why. “Don't you think I have to?”

He shrugged, and turned to look at me. “Is it what you want?”

“It's the right thing to do.”

His voice was harsh. “Is it what you want?” he repeated.

“It's what you would want.”

“Is it what you want?!” he screamed into the cavernous room, and it echoed around me, causing me to flinch. 

“No.”

He exhaled and sank back in the chair. He still seemed cold and distant, but his eyes had a sadness that reached out to me. “Then don't,” he whispered. 

I felt tears prickle the edges of my eyes and willed them away. “I have to,” I whispered back. “You know I do.”

He shook his head and began to talk quickly, his words pouring over me like waves, each one pounding and breathtaking till I could barely hold myself steady. “No, you don't. We could do this together, Donna. We could tell people that it's mine. We're not in office yet, we haven't done anything wrong. We met, and we fell in love, and we're just two staffers who met on the campaign trail. You wouldn't have to be my assistant, just another person who worked for the campaign. And we could get married. If we did it right away there wouldn't be any scandal. There wouldn't be any reason for people to feel anything other than happy for us. We could go through it all together, and I could help you, and we could raise the baby together, and it could have your eyes and we won't have to ever worry that it will grow up to have my hair. And you could stay and we could be parents together, and we could be really really happy.”

I braced myself against the arm rest and tried to stop crying, but somewhere around marriage the tears had started and I couldn't stop them. 

He reached over and wiped them from my face. “I've never met anyone who cries without crying, before,” he whispered, and the tenderness in his voice made the tears flow faster. 

“Josh,” I said with an unsteady voice. “We can't do any of those things.”

In his face I could see that he knew that already, that he understood, but his voice was weak like a child and he mumbled, “Why not?” anyway.

I smiled at him through salty tears. “You know why. We aren't those people. They sound lovely, but we aren't them.”

“We could be.”

“You barely know me. I met you four weeks ago when I took a job that didn't exist.”

He smiled despite his otherwise sad face. “So why can't we take this life that doesn't exist?”

“Because it's a whole life. Because we don't know each other as well as we might want to. Because we're not in love. And mostly because I'm carrying someone else's child, and if I was ever going to raise a baby with you, I would want it to grow up and have you hair.”

He laughed and then leaned forward and rested his forehead against mine. “You really are quite beautiful,” he whispered.

“You really are quite wonderful,” I whispered back.

When we left the Symphony Association, he took me to dinner, and we didn't talk about it anymore. We talked about our pasts. He told me how he had met Sam, and about the first time he saw Governor Bartlett speak. I told him about my childhood obsession with Georgia O'Keeffe and how I had secretly wanted to be a painter, but as it turned out, had not an inkling of talent. We talked some of the campaign and where it was headed. We argued over school vouchers and whether Fitzgerald was better than Hemingway. He told me I had the most amazing blue eyes he had ever seen. I told him I could be happy for the rest of my life if I could spend it watching him smile. We agreed that Ella Fitzgerald was the greatest singer of all time and that Chet Baker did the best version of “My Funny Valentine,” bar none. He complained that Connecticut was cold. I told him Connecticut had nothing on Wisconsin. We walked back to the hotel holding hands and hesitated to say goodbye outside my room door. He ran his fingers back and forth over my hand and pressed his forehead against mine again. I told him to sleep tight and I would see him in the morning. He smiled and kissed my forehead goodnight before walking away. I went inside, packed my things and drove out of New Hampshire before I could change my mind. 

* * *

“You didn't tell him you were leaving?”

She looked up at him, almost surprised for the second time to see him there. “Huh?”

He made the same expectant face that had annoyed her earlier. “I said, you didn't tell him you were leaving?”

She sighed, and felt the same odd pang of regret she had felt so many years before. “No, I didn't.”

“Oh.”

She glared at him. His tone sounded judgmental and the thought that he would ever consider taking the high road with her was infuriating. “I didn't have to tell him,” she explained curtly. “He knew. He knew I was going. He knew before I even did.”

“Still.” he said taking a bite of his steak. 

She was really starting to hate him again. “It's not the same,” she pointed out. “It's not anywhere close to what you did. I didn't do that to him. I didn't treat Josh like that.”

He raised an eyebrow and set his fork down. “I didn't say it was the same, dear.” She hated the calm way he spoke and considered leaving. “I was just asking a question is all. I was just asking because it didn't seem like you.”

“How do you even know what's like me?'

“Donna, I'm..”

“Maybe this whole thing is a bad idea. Maybe we should just call it a night.”

“No,” he said with an anger she hadn't felt from him in years. It made her stomach curl, but it got her attention. He sighed and a ran a hand through his hair, the dark blue sleeve of his jacket obscured his face for a second. When he dropped his arm, he was calm again. “I'm sorry. Please continue.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said resolutely. “And Donna, do eat something. Your food is getting cold.” 

She looked down at her plate, and realized she hadn't even taken a bite. She picked up her fork and lifted the pasta to her mouth. It was getting cold, but it felt good to put something in her system. 

“So did you go back to Madison?”

“Yes.”

“And you saw David?” She nodded. “And how was that?”

“It was...actually, it was good at first. He was actually excited for that first week, and at first his excitement was enough for me.”

“And Josh? What did he think?”

She shrugged. “We didn't talk. At first I didn't call because I didn't know what to say. Then I got settled back with David, and I was scared to tell him. I thought he would be disappointed in me. I had told him that being with David wasn't what I wanted. I knew it wasn't what he wanted for me. So I didn't call. I watched the campaign. I looked for any sign of him, a quote in the paper, an interview on the radio, a picture on the Internet. But it all made me feel worse for leaving.”

“But you did go back to him, didn't you?”

She frowned into her pasta and shook her head. “No. I went back to the job.”

He smiled like he had finally gotten what he wanted. “Go on,” he urged her.

* * *

You have to understand that this time I really believed it. I really believed David had changed. It's hard to be with someone for as long as we were and to just break it off. I had already done it once, and I didn't think I could do it again. When I had the accident, I was exactly two months pregnant. It was so early on, and I had made this decision with him, but I didn't believe in the decision, it didn't suddenly feel right just because it was what he wanted. In my mind I was still rethinking things, still wanting things to turn out differently. When I had asked him how he would feel about terminating the pregnancy he had thrown a fit. He called me names and then questioned whether it was even his. I don't know why I stayed, why he seemed to have this power over me, but after the accident, after he didn't show up because he was off drinking with friends, I knew I had done exactly what I didn't want to do. I had let him take over my life again. 

I moved out of his place on a Wednesday, and got a hotel room. None of my friends in Madison lived there anymore. They'd all graduated and moved elsewhere. A hotel was as good a place as any, and I wasn't about to go home to my mother in the state I was in. Madison has an amazing Women's Health Clinic, and they were wonderful. I went in on a Friday, and since I didn't have anyone to drive me home, they let me stay overnight till I was able to drive myself back in the morning. Saturday was a bright April day, and though I was sore, I drove down to the Lake and sat on the beachy shore. It wasn't warm enough for the beach to be crowded, but it wasn't cold enough to keep me away. I sat there and watched the tide roll in and out, contemplating the choices I had made. I had become a statistic for a political debate. I was another woman who had had an abortion. And I wanted to feel apologetic for that. I wanted to feel like I was a bad person, but I didn't really feel that way. I felt like I had truly done the right thing, and that I was always going to be sad about having to make that decision, but I was never going to regret it. 

A waited another a week until I drove back to Nashua. This time I knew where I was going, but I had even less sense of what it was going to be like when I got there. I felt like a different person, standing on the threshold of the Bartlett for America campaign headquarters at quarter to 8:00 in the morning. I was somehow older and wiser; more experienced with the world and more comfortable in my own skin. I stood outside the office doors and tried to take another mental picture of the moment. Inside I could see that the office was filled with people, some running around hectically, others sitting at desks with great mounds of paper and the constant ringing of phones. When I put my hands on the door, and pulled it open, I smelled coffee and copier toner and the sweet smell of new paper, all over again. 

“Hey, Donna,” Sam greeted me. I was taken aback by his casual manner and wondered if he had even noticed I was gone for a month and a half. “Josh said he wasn't sure when you'd be back. He's in his office if you're looking for him.”

“Oh, yeah, thanks,” I mumbled in surprise as Sam walked off. I wasn't sure if I was annoyed or excited that Josh assumed I would be back. On the one hand it reeked of his arrogant side, on the other, it reminded me that we did in face speak a common language. I just didn't know if that language was going to include forgiveness. 

The steps to his office were slow and tentative. Through the partition in the glass I could see him. He was on the phone and looking through a binder as he spoke. His voice had the same confident cadence I had admired when I first met him. His hair was messy, and when he ran his hand through it I understood why. His shirt was on haphazardly again, the sleeves unevenly rolled up, the top unbuttoned to the tip of his white shirt. In some ways he looked exactly the way he had when I first met him, but in other ways he looked like a completely different person. This time he wasn't a name, a political operative I had to convince to hire me. He was Josh, and he was still the only thing I had that came close to being a friend. 

I walked as close as I could as quietly as I could until I was standing in the gap between the glass partitions. I stood still for a minute or two, watching him talk, until he had finished the conversation and put the phone down. When he looked up and saw me time stopped moving. It wasn't dramatic, or climatic, or anything you'd expect. There was sadness between us, but only the kind that comes with relief – the kind you get after things work out and you just kinda wished that you hadn't had to go through the bad to get to the okay. I gave him a half smile and he returned it. “Thank God,” he said in a steady simple voice. “There's all this work that needs to be done.”

We weren't champagne and flowers people. We weren't hugs and kisses people. We were never going to become the kind of people who celebrated our personal lives with anything other than silent understanding. It didn't mean that it meant any less to either of us. I sat at the desk next to his, took the stack of messages he handed me and started making calls. He went off to a finance meeting. And when half way through returning messages, I went to his desk to find his calender, I discovered under the mountains of papers and briefing books a tattered copy of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language.

And that's when it happened. That's when I officially fell in love with Joshua Lyman. 

I think that's the part of the story that usually marks the apex of conflict, and turns the rest of the narrative towards happy resolution. I think that's usually the part where the heroine swoons a little and the hero confesses his love and they find a way to be together no matter what, because in stories love can do that, it can overcome everything. In stories, no one wants to say 'no' to love. All the hurdles and obstacles are overcome, because nothing, nothing can fight love.

In reality, everything can win out over love. In our story, everything did. In our story, Mandy won out over love, and the campaign won out over love, and the presidency won out over love, and racist shooters won out over love, and swaggering military men who voted for Richie won out over love, and car bombs won out over love, and our own stupidity won out over love. In our story we had to radically redefine love, or we would have gone insane. 

When I decided I was in love with him, I got a stomach cramp. I had always experienced nerves and anxiety physically, as a headache or stomach pains, or even blurred eyesight once. Realizing you're in love with your boss is a moment of anxiety. Realizing you're in love with your boss when you have a job where people are watching you 24/7 to see when you're going to do something inappropriate so that they can expose it and take you all down, is a moment of extreme anxiety. My stomach hurt like hell. It was quarter to midnight, and I hadn't seen Josh for hours. As far as I could tell no one was even left in the office. I had work I wanted to finish and no hotel room to go to, so I hadn't minded staying. Still, I was bent over my desk, holding my stomach and grimacing when Josh finally returned. It took one look at his face to see that he misunderstood. 

“Donna.” He said my name like a question and a plea and a demand all at once. I tried to stand up and tell him I was fine, but he was moving too fast, making too many sudden decisions for me to explain. He guided me to a chair, bent next to me and began running his hand through my hair to push it away from my face. 

“Josh,” I started to say, but he was busy asking questions like “where?” and “how bad?” and even “how far along?” to hear me. “Josh,” I said again, but he still wasn't listening, and instead was running back into the office space to see if anyone was out there. There wasn't. “Josh,” I called again. When he rushed back to my side, pulled out his phone and starting dialing, I lost it. I shouted his name once more and hit him as hard as I could on the side of his arm.

“Jesus, ow!” He dropped the phone and looked at me with wide surprised eyes. “What the hell, Donna?”

“I'm fine,” I said quietly. “I'm fine.”

He looked at me like he didn't believe me and then stood up and leaned against the desk in front of me. “When I came in here, you were...and I thought...”

“My stomach hurt for a second, that's all.”

“Your stomach?” In his mind that clearly meant one thing and not another. “But you're...”

“I'm not,” I said, my voice even quieter than before. It was the first time I felt sad saying it out loud and I was surprised to find myself feeling that way in front of him. 

He looked sad too, but still uncertain. “So you're not...”

I shook my head. “I'm not.”

“And it went okay? You're okay?”

I gave him a weak smile to prove it. “I'm okay.”

He paused. “I meant you're okay, healthy okay. Not, all the way okay.”

I nodded. “I knew what you meant. I'm fine, Josh. I'm in good health.”

“Cause the other...”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “The other's a little different.”

“Yeah,” he echoed. The silence fell over us again as we regarded each other. He looked me over, his eyes traveling up and down my body, and I didn't mind. There was something about the way Josh looked at me that made it feel different from how any other guy had ever looked at me. There was an insecure period in my life when I hated men looking at me, when I felt ugly and stupid and wanted to be invisible. I wouldn't have minded if Josh spent his whole life looking at me. 

“It's pretty late,” he said after awhile. “You want to get out of here? I can walk you to the hotel.”

I shook my head. “My car's out front.”

“Good,” he smiled. “Then you can give me a lift.”

I bit my lower lip and confessed the problem. “I don't have a hotel room, Josh. I didn't book one ahead because I didn't know...” I looked up at him as I trailed off. “I didn't know what was going to happen when I got here...if you...or I...anyway, I didn't book one. And when I called a few hours ago, they didn't have any. Something about a convention in town.”

“Dentists,” he said.

“Huh?”

He shrugged. “Dentist convention.”

I made a face. “Don't they usually go to Vegas or Atlantic City for those things?”

“You'd think. Instead they came here.” I shook my head in disbelief. “You can stay with me.”

I stared at him blankly. “I can't,” I said quietly.

He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Let's not have this conversation,” he said simply. “The Convention will be gone tomorrow, you can get a room then. You can't sleep here or in the car or where ever else you were thinking of going. It's late, no one will find out, and we both know we want to spend time together. So let's just go, I'm tired.”

I couldn't help but laugh, and he smiled in return. “God with persuasive skills like that, I can't believe you're not married to some gorgeous model heiress who can finance your political aspirations.”

He shrugged his coat on and waited for me as I gathered my things. “I suggested to this one girl once that we get married.”

“Yeah?” I said walking out the front door with him, “How'd that turn out?”

He shrugged as we headed toward the car. “She left me.” I felt a pang of guilt as I unlocked the car. I turned to look at him and saw that he was smiling wickedly. “But she came back to me. Couldn't get enough of me I guess. So I know I've got her. It's only a matter of time now before I wear her down.”

I laughed and pushed him, and he laughed in return. “You really are quite beautiful,” he whispered.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you are my Mr. Wonderful. If you hurry up and get in the car Mr. Wonderful, I can promise more beautiful things in your future.” 

He wiggled his eyebrows and got in quickly, shutting the door behind him and whipping his seatbelt on in seconds. The ride to the hotel and the walk to his room were short but full. He told me how the campaign was going, and what problems they were facing now, and he talked excitedly about Chicago and the Governor's chances. I listened to it all and didn't mention that I knew most of it, that I had tracked things in the media and followed everything they'd done and everywhere they'd been. I liked it when he talked about the campaign. He would get wide-eyed and excited and his speech patterns would pick up speed, and I could tell he was happy, even when he was complaining about things that had gone wrong. 

Inside his hotel room looked exactly the way mine had before I left. One large king bed in the center, one rose upholstered chair by the window, and a view of the tree line. I dropped my suitcase by the chair and went to the window to look out. It was strange how much things could change in two months. It was amazing how much I could change. I saw his reflection in the window pane, but this time, against the dark night sky, he was in perfect focus. I smiled at him, and his reflection smiled back. Then he turned and walked into the bathroom. 

I took the time to change into an old pair of pajamas. They were blue, the same shade as my eyes, and the pants were a size too big so they hung low on my hips and flowed around my legs. I hated waking up in clothes pulled tight against my body, so I preferred them this way, and didn't bother to tighten the drawstring even though the top of my pink satin underwear was visible. I put a matching blue tank top on. It on the other hand was tight enough that I didn't need a bra and that it wouldn't move when I slept. I wondered for a second if I should be concerned about impropriety. Then I remembered I was sleeping in my boss' hotel room a month after I had left him to have an abortion he almost tried to talk me out of by convincing me to marry him and raise the baby together. Suddenly whether or not he could see my nipples through my shirt seemed lame. 

I was looking for my toothbrush when he emerged in boxes and a faded Yale t-shirt. He looked amazing, but my first thought was whether it bothered him that I hadn't graduated from college. I started to realize that my feelings for him were radically different than any feelings I had had for other guys. “Hey,” I said and then turned back to my bag to locate the missing toothbrush. 

He was staring at my chest, and I didn't even care. He didn't seem to either. When I finally located my toothbrush and looked up, he was leaning against the door to the bathroom with his arms folded across his chest, staring at me with a devil may care smile. I smiled back. He was addictive, and I didn't care about that either. I walked past him to the bathroom, and reached over and scratched his stomach as I passed him. His devil smile turned wolfish and I laughed despite myself. 

In the bathroom I washed my face and brushed my teeth and sat down on the edge of the bathtub while I listened to him humming and moving around in the other room. I looked at myself in the mirror and cocked my head at the reflection. I was in love with Josh Lyman. I was about 99.9% sure then when I walked out of the bathroom, I was going to have sex with Josh Lyman. I shook my head. “This can't be happening like this,” I said to my reflection. She shrugged and asked why not. “Cause two weeks ago I was carrying my ex-boyfriend's child.” 

She shrugged again. “Not because you loved him. You stopped loving him three months ago.” Then she smiled and leaned forward. “You love this guy,” she said angling her head toward the bathroom door. 

“Okay,” I agreed. “But he's my boss.”

She shrugged again. “These things happen.”

“These things happen? That's the best you can do?”

“Donna?” Josh's voice interrupted my thoughts. “I'll be right out,” I shouted to the door. When I looked back in the mirror I only saw myself, sitting on the edge of a tub without any answers. I shrugged and stood up. “These things happen,” I mumbled to myself, and walked out of the bathroom. 

The next few months were hard. We worked non stop....

* * *

“Wait, wait, wait.”

She raised an eyebrow at her dinner companion. “Is there a problem?”

“You can't just jump around like that,” he said pointing a finger at her. “What happened that night? What happened between you two?”

The waiter came by at that moment and picked up his plate. “Are you finished?” he asked her in his French accent. She looked down at her plate. She still hadn't eaten very much. She smiled at the waiter and nodded. “Do you want the rest wrapped up?”

She was unsure. She turned to her right and considered asking if he'd want it, but then decided it was cream based and it would never taste right heated up. “No thank you,” she decided on her own. The waiter eyed her for a second, then picked up her plate and cleared all the others before walking off.

“The story.”

He was getting impatient and it was starting to be humorous for her, after all this time, to have him so anxious to find out the details to a story he already knew the ending to. “It's just,” she said, blushing. “There really are some parts that are personal. I mean you're...and I'm...and he's...it's just strange to tell you about it, is all.”

He shook his head. “It's part of the story.” He titled his head and looked at the space to her right. “I'm guessing most would say it's the best part of the story.” He held his gaze a second longer and then turned back to face her. “Please, Donnatella, tell me the whole story.”

She acquiesced again. “All right, but please don't call me that. Only...”

“Only he calls you that,” her companion finished. He nodded. “I understand.”

* * *

“What things happen?” Josh asked as I got out of the bathroom. He was laying on his back on the bed, with the covers stripped down and bunched at the bottom. 

I shook my head. “Nothing, I was just talking to myself.”

“You do that a lot?”

I smiled. “It's probably best if I don't answer that.”

He laughed and it filled my heart with a lightness it hadn't felt since I had first joined the campaign. I started to walk to the bed but he stopped me. “Hey, raised in the cheeseland girl, turn the light off.”

I made a face and went over to the lamp by the window. “It's America's dairyland, and it wasn't a barn. We had manners and decorum.”

“Yes, clearly, that explains the cheesehead hats.”

“Well, some of us had manners and decorum,” I amended and turned the light switch so that the room was dark except for the small bit of moonlight that snuck through the thin curtains. It was enough to see my way back to the bed, and make out his features as he watched me.

I liked the way he watched me, as if he was holding me up with his eyes, and willing me to come to him. I was going. It was the only place in the room to go to. When I laid down on the bed, he didn't hesitate to pull me to him. His hands went around my waist and he pulled me till I was flush against him, stomach to stomach. His head was higher than mine, and my own tucked in neatly under his chin and against his chest. He started rubbing his thumb up and down my back and I let one arm fall across his side, resting my hand on his hip. 

He sighed into my hair and I snuggled closer. “I missed you,” he said. 

“You knew I would be back.”

“I only hoped,” he confessed. “I only kept telling myself that so I wouldn't go insane. Most of the time I couldn't stop thinking about you being back there with that asshole.” I pushed my leg between both of his, and rubbed my foot up and down the calf muscle of his left leg. “Were you?” he whispered into my hair. “Were you with him?”

I leaned my face into his chest, and squeezed his hip with my hand. “Yes,” I moaned. He laid still for a moment, and then his other hand joined the first on my back, and together they moved lower until he was grabbing my ass, pulling me into him. I squeaked with surprise and moved my leg from between his till it was wrapped around his waist, and we were flush together in all the right places. “I didn't want to tell you,” I confessed.

His hands were frantically needing my flesh, one staying low while the other moved up my back to the base of my neck. “I didn't want to know.”

“But you asked.”

“I had to.” He ran his hand up into my hair and cradle my entire head in it. I felt small and protected. He gently tilted my head back and looked down so we were staring into each other's eyes. His frantic touching stopped, and he held me as he spoke. “I don't know how this is happening,” he confessed solemnly. “I'm not like this. I never been like this. And everything you said before you left was true. We aren't those people I wanted us to be. We have only known each other for a short time, and even less of that time have we spent together. We don't know each other as well as we might want to. We're in a job that makes everything we do complicated. You just went through one of the most difficult times of your entire life, and I'm not naïve enough to think that I can make it all right or that you're just going to get over that and move on. But you make my skin feel alive in a way it never has, and I feel more comfortable with you then anyone in my life. I know that when two people are trying to have a relationship they court each other and they go on dates and they listen to each other's life stories, and they share tentative first kisses, and they meet each other's friends and they celebrate three month anniversaries and sometime down the road after all of that they decide whether they love each other. We haven't done any of that, and because we are who we are we never will. But there's one thing you were wrong about before you left, and maybe it took you leaving for us both to see it, because I admit, I can't explain how it's possible, and you can probably use all the chemistry formulas you won't but I bet you can't explain how it happened either.”

He stopped then, maybe to catch his breath, maybe because he didn't think he had to say it. I had to hear it. “What happened?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper, his face so close that even speaking made me lose my breath. “What was I wrong about?”

He looked down at me, his eyes full of my reflection. “We are in love.” 

I didn't quite care if tears were flowing down my eyes or not. Our lips crashed into each other like ocean waves, and the wetness seemed appropriate. Josh's hand was firm on my head, and his fingers rubbed my hair and scalp. I pulled myself closer to him with my leg as our tongues anxiously caressed each other, every taste and sensation urging us on. It was like that at first. Every time his hand reached an inch of my skin he hadn't felt before he would groan and try to kiss me deeper. Every time I found a new part of his body I hadn't yet touched I would moan and try to kiss him harder. I can't quite explain how we managed to breathe at all, we stayed connected everywhere. We managed to undress each other while kissing, we managed to moan and give encouragement and shout each other's names without our tongues parting. When we made love, it lasted for hours, and the whole time I lost all sense of where my mouth ended and his began.

It's like that when you're in love. When you're really head over heels, no turning back in love. There's no touch that doesn't feel like magic. There's no sensation that can be explained in mere words. There's no kiss that doesn't defy science. There is no chemical equation that holds true when two people in love come together. It is always undefinable, incalculable, and literally amazing. 

As it turned out, we would have to live on that night for months. In the morning we were coy and blissful with each other, teasing in the shower and down right goofy as we dressed. But when we left the hotel and walked to the campaign headquarters, we disavowed any knowledge of the two people we had been – the two people who had inexplicably fallen in love and made the world a place of magic. I was an assistant back at work, doubling my efforts to make up for the time I had spent away. And Josh was dedicated, consumed with beating Hoynes in Chicago, and anxious to please the Governor who had yet to really open up to any of them. 

And Mandy returned. She was, as I was informed by someone other than Josh, his off again on again girlfriend. He had never mentioned her, but I didn't care. The claim I had on him was of a different nature, and I could neither demand his attention nor deny that I had it unconditionally. It wasn't that it was easy seeing them together. It wasn't. It was painful, and I was at times jealous, but there was something in the way we never talked about her that comforted me. It was as if when we were together, we were the only people that mattered, and we didn't want to bring anyone else into it. We didn't want to complicate it with real life, with what we thought C.J. would say or Leo would do, or how it would affect Mandy. We were us when we could be, and we were two different people when we couldn't. It worked for us. 

Once, when we were sitting on the bus to Chicago, and everyone around us had fallen asleep, he leaned over and asked me if I ever doubted his feelings. If not being able to be together made me doubt him. I smiled and shook my head. 

“Sometimes I think we're not being fair to each other,” he whispered with a sad, apologetic smile. “I just keep thinking, love is supposed to bring people together.”

I took his hand in mine, and traced my fingers along his. “Love is what you decide it is. Our love is just ours, it doesn't have to abide by anyone else's rules. It doesn't have to look like anyone else's idea of love.”

He smiled. “What does ours look like?”

“It looks like two people who would give up everything just to be close to each other, because being in the same room and not being able to touch is a hundred times better then not being together at all.” He flashed me his dimples and I was powerless to not grin back. “It looks like two people who want the other to live the life they want, to work for something that means the world to them, even if the work gets in the way.”

“It looks like to people who've already settled on forever, and are just bidding time till we get there,” he added. 

I smiled brightly. “I like that,” I whispered. “You're good at this.”

“I guess I better be.” He squeezed my hand. “I love you, you know. More than I know how to say.”

I smiled. “I know, that's why you don't have to say it.”

“Here,” he said tilting his body slightly. “Sleep on my shoulder. No one will think anything of it. It's the power of gravity.” I smiled and nodded, before leaning my weight into him and resting my head on his shoulder. “You really are quite beautiful,” he whispered into my hair.

“You really are quite wonderful,” I whispered back. I didn't open my eyes and look up, but I pictured him smiling at me. 

* * *

“Dessert?” The waiter asked. She had started to suspect his accent was fake, and her eyes narrowed at him as he stood there in his white shirt and pompous vest. She had no idea why the waiter was annoying her this much. It was unlike her, but she couldn't help it.

“Just coffee,” her companion said, and then corrected himself when he looked over and saw her. “I mean, I'll just have coffee. No dessert for me.”

“Ma'am?”

She looked between him and the waiter. She supposed it was a good sign that it had occurred to him to consider that she might have an opinion, a desire of her own, and that it was worth hearing. “We'll have two coffees,” she said to the waiter, “but make mine Decaf.”

The waiter nodded and walked off. 

“You drink decaf?” he asked with surprise as he ran his hand through his gray hair again.

It was the fourth time he had done that since they'd met in the lobby of the restaurant. She wished he would stop. It was unnerving how much it reminded her of Josh when he did it, and Josh was the last person she wanted to compare him to. “I'm drinking it now,” she said, not bothering to over any more information. It was none of his business. It was never going to be. 

“I'm really glad we're doing this,” he said suddenly, and it threw her off balance. She looked away seeking solace and understanding elsewhere. Why couldn't she decide how she felt about this man and stick with it? She turned back and looked at him, but she didn't respond to his comment, and eventually he realized that she wasn't going to. “So what happened in Chicago?”

“Well, obviously Governor Bartlett got the nomination, from there it was a long, well fought march to the White House.”

“And you two? What happened with you two?”

She shrugged. “We had stolen moments here and there.” She considered telling him about the weekend in Chicago, about Josh losing his father, about her flying out to Connecticut to be with him, about making love in his childhood room and cuddling in front of the fire while his mom looked on lovingly. But she didn't. It was Josh's part of the story to tell, not hers, and he didn't want to tell it so she would leave him to it. 

“Did he stay with Mandy?”

“No, they were over after Chicago. She left the campaign a few months after the President won the nomination. She came back for awhile after our first year in office, but she didn't stay, and he was never close with her again.”

He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “I don't get how you could do it. How you could love one person but be with someone else, or watch him be with someone other than you?”

She shrugged. “We didn't have a choice. We learned to live with it.”

“For eight years?” He shook his head. “You never doubted it?”

She bit her lower lip. “We had our moments. We had our fights.” She thought she saw him smile and she wanted to reach over and smack his arm. 

“Tell me,” her companion pushed. 

She shook her head. “We don't like to talk about them. What good does it do?”

“C'mon, it's part of the story.”

“You keep saying that. Just because something's a part of the story doesn't mean it's worth telling.”

Her companion leaned forward. “It's all worth telling. The blood and the guts as well as the magic.”

She hesitated. “Fine. He...um...in our first year, he...he was shot.”

* * *

I used to have this paranoid fear that something would happen to him and no one would think to tell me. No one knew what were to each other – not our friends or colleagues. Only his mother knew, but she was in Connecticut and sworn to secrecy. So I made him put me as his emergency contact on all his forms. I made sure I was number one on his speed dial for both his cell and his home phone. I made him carry a card in his wallet that had my name and numbers to call in an emergency, and I made him tape it to the kitchen wall in his apartment. He did everything I asked with a smile, his eyes filled with laughter, but he never once teased me or made fun. And one day I opened my wallet and found that there was a red card behind my Driver's License and it said, “Emergency Contact,” on it, and it had his name and number. 

When I first heard about the shooting in Rosslyn, I couldn't breath, and my stomach began to burn. It was phantom pain, but I had to take four Advil before I could work up the strength to make it to my car. I listened to the radio, the whole way, running red lights, screaming at police blockades till I could get through, but the radio only mentioned the president. I called Josh's cell twenty times, and each time he didn't answer I panicked more. When I got to the hospital and parked I tried once more. His phone was shut off, and when I heard “the cellular customer you are looking for is no longer in range,” I vomited in the parking lot. 

It took a lot of blubbering and screaming to finally get into the waiting room where everyone was. I don't know why, but I just expected him to be there. I just expected him to be there with a dead phone battery and an apologetic smile, and I expected that the air would crackle with electricity the way it did when we were in the same place. When I got there, and he wasn't in the room, I still expected him to show up, to have been getting coffee or food, or calling the Minority whip, or just anything. Even when Toby spoke to me, I expected Josh to walk in behind me and brush against my skin the way we did on purpose when we didn't think others would notice.

I listened to Toby, but his words didn't make any sense to me. I kept thinking, “No, Toby, you don't understand. Josh and I are connected in a way no on else could understand. We're in love, madly, deeply in love, and we're looking ahead to an amazing future. You just don't see it. I'm his emergency number. If something happened, I would know.” I kept looking at all those faces, and I saw pity in their eyes. Pity for me, cause I had lost something they didn't know I had, and I was the one too stupid to realize it.

I stayed in the hospital, silent and barely moving until he was awake, and then for the first time in three days, I walked back outside and vomited all over the front lawn. When they finally let me in to see him, I was already crying. He was sitting in bed, and he was pale and he had tubes running in and out of him everywhere, and the lips I remembered kissing that first night in the hotel like it had only been yesterday were dry and cracked. He had never looked more amazing to me than he did then. His eyes turned to me, and he whispered, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I whispered back, and I went to his bed side, and put my hand around his, holding tight just in case he got the idea to try and leave me again. I wanted to be a source of strength for him. I wanted to pour all of my energy into him so that he would become strong and healthy and return to me the same Josh I had met in Nashua, but I didn't feel strong, as I stared at him lying incapacitated in a hospital bed. I felt weak and fragile and I felt the same thing he had back on our way to Chicago, that this wasn't right and it wasn't fair because love was supposed to bring people together, but our love meant that I couldn't lean over and kiss him because Leo and the President were standing in the back of the room. 

The months that followed were some of the hardest of my life. Years later he would confess that he didn't really understand what I went through until I was hurt in Gaza and he was sitting idly in a hospital room in Germany staring at my body for hours. 

It's one thing to have your love tested by circumstances like work, or family, or friends who wouldn't approve. Those circumstances are difficult, but they aren't insurmountable. We always viewed them as what they were: obstacles for the time being. Even during the hardest circumstances, even when he decided to date someone else and I decided to be with other men, in the back of our minds there was always a temporal limitation to it all. We thought, these were circumstances getting in the way now, but they weren't always going to be there. They hurt, but so long as we were honest with each other, so long as we never gave away our futures to other people, we were able to rationalize the decisions we made to set aside our feelings.

It's a different thing entirely to have your love tested by death. Death is insurmountable and non-negotiable, and no pact we had with each other was going to reconcile death. It was under this realization that I undertook his after-care. I needed to be around him as much as I could. I needed to make sure that death didn't become an obstacle. You would have thought that the whole thing would bring us closer together. We'd stared into an abyss of loneliness and come out the other side. I moved into his apartment for two months, and no one blinked an eye. We suddenly had the freedom, time and space to be those two people who had fallen in love in Nashua. But in reality, we barely spoke to each other.

I was doing his laundry one Saturday, a month into his recovery when I had the strongest flashback to doing David's laundry while he studied for the MCATs. It was so strong I had to stop what I was doing and lean against the dryer to steady myself. Josh's boxers were in my hands, and they suddenly seemed foreign to me. We hadn't been together since the night of the first Inauguration. We hadn't kissed since Christmas of the year before. We hadn't smiled at each other since I had first seen him in that hospital bed. I realized that I felt hollow around him, that I felt like I was back in the kind of relationship I didn't want – the kind where I was the caretaker, doing everything I was told for the slim hope that the guy I loved would be pleased. I didn't resent Josh because I felt that. I resented myself. I resented that I had taken the best relationship I had ever had, and let it turn in to something else. 

I folded the rest of the laundry mechanically, taking my time so I could prolong the time away from him. I had become consumed with the hypothetical question of what would have happened if he had died. He would have died and no one would have ever known about us. Mandy, or Joey Lucas or some other woman would stand over his grave and everyone would look at her with sad eyes, and say what a shame it was, how they could have really been happy together, and how they imagined in his own way he had really loved her. I would have had no claim on him. His things would have gone to his mother, and though she would have welcomed me with open arms, I would have felt it was inappropriate. I would have wanted to honor his memory and not stain it with rumors of inappropriate office relations. In the end I would have had nothing of his but a tattered copy of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language. I had no claim on him.

I walked the stairs from the basement back up to his apartment with heavy feet, and when I entered his apartment carrying the laundry basket, I didn't bother to feign a smile or a sign of contentment. It was pointless to put airs on. I wasn't the kind of person who did that, and that was part of the problem. I had started to become someone else because I thought it was what I was supposed to do to help him. I had stopped being me. 

He was lying on the couch with his feet up and a blanket wrapped around him. He'd been wearing the same pair of pajamas for two days and his hair had developed its own infrastructure. He was reading Scientific America, and on the coffee table in front of him were two neat stacks of reading materials – one stack for what he'd read, the other for what he still had to read. I had started to suspect that reading was one of the many excuses he used for why we never talked to each other or sat together or did anything together that wasn't about me taking care of him. I had started to suspect that reading was his way of avoiding me, the way lingering in the laundry room was my way of avoiding him. I stopped by the couch, set the laundry basket down and leaned against the wall, folding my arms against my chest. He looked over at me, but didn't say anything. My face was blank, emotionless, and his was calm and steady in return. We scanned each other's faces with our eyes. I was looking for some sign of the person I used to know in his face. I don't know what he was hoping to find in mine. 

“You don't have to be here,” he said without changing a single feature on his face.

“Then why don't you take a shower on your own,” I responded with the same emotionless tone. He just stared. “Yeah,” I half mumbled. “I didn't think so.”

“I could get a nurse, you know. The hospital gave me all the information.” He was still cold and lifeless, but I sensed a slight change in his tone, like he was considering starting a fight with me but hadn't yet committed himself to it.

“So why don't you?”

He regarded me slowly, and then pushed too hard. “I will. I'll call first thing Monday.”

I wasn't in any mood to be challenged by him. If he thought he was playing some game of chicken with me that was fine, but I had something more at stake here then he realized, and I was not going to blink. “And until then?”

“It's just a day. I'll be fine.”

“You'll smell.”

“I don't have anyone to impress.” His eyes had narrowed at me, and there was venom brewing in his voice. 

I raised an eyebrow. “Good,” I said with a loud sigh. “I'm tired. I'm going home.” I turned away from him, leaving the laundry basket where it was, and headed to the kitchen where my coat and purse were.

“So you're just going to leave?” he yelled from the living room. I grabbed my coat and slipped it on as I closed my eyes and tried to drown him out. 

“Yeah,” I shouted back from the kitchen. “You don't need me here, and you obviously don't want me here.”

He was screaming when he spoke. “Fine. Things get hard so you're just going to take off. Huh, Donna? That's what you do isn't it? Things get hard so you leave. Just like you did in Nashua.”

The venom had fully reached me, and I bent over against the kitchen chair as my stomach churned. “That's not the same,” I mumbled, but I knew he couldn't hear me. I straightened my back and walked defiantly back to the living room where he was sitting up, his face red and angry. “That's not what happened,” I said trying to stay calm, trying to prevent an all out screaming match.

It didn't work. “That's exactly what happened!” he screamed. “Things got hard so you left. You lied to me and you left, and I was willing to do anything to help you.”

“How can you even say that? There was nothing you could do for me. I was pregnant for god's sake. I was pregnant and I couldn't deal with that and be there at the same time.”

He stared at me with angry eyes. “I loved you and I wanted to take care of you, and instead you left so you could go off and fuck some other guy.”

“Oh, fuck you, Josh,” I exploded. “How long have you been carrying this around, huh? You've blamed me this whole time? It was three fucking years ago, and since then I have never left your side.” 

“Yeah, I've carried it around,” he yelled back. “We could have been together then. We could still be together without any of the hiding or the sacrifices or all the lies we tell each other so we can pretend like it's easy to not be together, when it's not. We could have avoided all these years of shit and pain, but you left.”

“How can you even...this is bullshit, and you know it, Josh. All of that is bullshit. We would never have worked out then, it was a stupid fantasy and you knew it.”

He smirked. “Well if I didn't then, I do now.” 

“You're being a complete jerk. What happened then has nothing to do with what's going on now. You're not being fair.”

“Fair? Fair? You think any of this is fair? You think I wanted to get shot. You think I like spending weeks in a hospital bed where people poke and prod me? Only so I can come home and be stuck here like an invalid where I can't work, and I can't see my friends, and I can't wash my fucking hair without your help, and I can't pull up my god damn pants without your help. At what point do I get to say what's fair?”

I balled my fists in anger. “So that's it. That's what this is about. You're pissed because you need me to take care of you?”

He sighed loudly and leaned back in the couch, closing his eyes as he went. When he spoke his voice was still tight with anger, but he had stopped shouting. “I'm pissed because I feel helpless, and I don't like giving up control.” He looked over at me then, and his face had completely changed. It was sad and tired and ready to give up. “I'm pissed because I finally have you here with me, and I can't do anything about it, and I resent you for it. I know I shouldn't, but I do. I resent you for taking care of me. I resent you because I feel like you have to be here and like you wouldn't be otherwise.”

I exhaled loudly as his words sunk in. I was suddenly exhausted from everything, from facing the prospect of his death, from taking care of him, from fighting. I sank into the chair next to the couch and finally uncrossed my arms, letting all the tension flow out through my fingertips. I looked over at Josh, his sad eyes still fixed on me, and I smiled weakly. “How did we get here?” I asked him.

He shrugged and smiled apologetically. “Honestly, I don't know. I know I don't like it here.”

I nodded. “Me either.”

He ran his hand through his hair and sighed again. “We ask a lot of each other,” he said matter of factly. “Even more so lately. It was bound to build up. No one is this strong, not even us.”

I smiled, relieved that he was willing to admit that we weren't invincible, that we weren't immune from all the hurt and pain and doubt that surrounds loving another person. “Look,” I began to confess to him. “I do want to be here. I want to be here for you, and I need to be here for me, but I don't want to feel like your nurse or your maid, or, honestly, even your assistant. And lately that is exactly how I feel.”

He watched me as I talked and I was reminded of the morning in my hotel in Nashua when we talked about my pregnancy. I remembered the feeling I had then, that we were two people who really listened to each other, who could really speak openly and honestly with each other. It was a good memory and that it had returned gave me hope that he and I were getting back to that place. 

“I'm sorry if I've made you feel that way,” he admitted. He pursed his lips in thought. “I want you here too. I just...We have this relationship that is predicated on a few stolen moments over a period of three years, Donna. And I cling to the memory of those moments as the purest and best examples of real love and passion and pleasure in my life. I remember the times we've been together as magic, and in them I'm exactly the person I always wanted to be. In your eyes I'm exactly the person I want to be, but...” he looked off in the distance before continuing. “But these past weeks...there's no magic here. I'm a broken guy with a body that's not working right, and when I need you to dress me in the morning I feel so far removed from that guy who had those amazing moments with you. I don't want you to see me like this. I'm afraid it will take away all the magic.”

My heart was clenched, and though I wasn't sure what to say, I managed a weak, “Josh.”

He looked at me and smiled with a shrug. “Either way I shouldn't take it out on you.”

“You shouldn't feel it in the first place.”

“Yeah?” he asked, his voice tired but hopeful.

“Yeah. We're nothing but magic.”

He smiled the first real full smile I'd seen since I had visited him in his hospital after surgery. “So,” he said, his voice finally had its characteristic charm back. “You still think I'm sexy?”

“You really do need to shower.” The Scientific America flew past me, too far on the right to actually hit me. “And apparently your arm still needs some work.”

He laughed and started to lift himself from the couch. “Well,” he said, managing to stand up on his own. “At least my mouth is still working really well.” I got up and walked over to him, standing in front of him and looking up into his face. I didn't reach out for him like I had done for the past week, but instead let him reach for me. He slid his arms around my waist and pulled me close. “My tongue's working really well too,” he added.

“Oh yeah?”

He smiled at me, his eyes soft with desire. “Yeah.” He bent down and kissed me, and I leaned into him as if I had never felt his body before. His hands remained steady on my lower back, and his kiss was soft and leisurely, as if he was taking the scenic tour of my mouth. I moaned, when he finally released my lips and leaned back. When I opened my eyes he was smiling at me. “You really are quite beautiful,” he whispered.

I smiled and rested my head on his chest. “You really are quite wonderful,” I whispered into his cotton pajama shirt. 

* * *

“Would you like a refill on your coffee, ma'am?” The waiter asked her. She shook her head and tried to think for a second if there was a way to expose his accent as fake. Maybe if she could get him to say something really American, like 'hot dog.' But how does something like that come up over coffee? The waiter refilled the other cups and then walked off again, and she mentally shook her head as he went. She just couldn't understand why she had become so interested in the authenticity of their French waiter. She just couldn't understand why she had channeled all her desire for truth on to this guy, as opposed to some other. She turned to look at the man across the table and wondered some more.

“This is really good coffee,” he said to her. She thought it was an inane comment and smiled back politely. “I was sorry to hear that he was shot.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You knew?”

He made a face like she was something of an idiot, and she felt her hands ball up under the table. “I do read the papers. I do pay attention to what happens in the world. I did know you worked for him.” He paused and cocked his head to the side. She did the same thing when she thought about something, but it made her uneasy to see the movement reflected in his image. “Course, I didn't know what he was to you. And I certainly didn't know what he was going to become.”

“Yes,” she said hesitantly. “Well, no one really knew that.”

He shrugged. “You two knew.”

She looked over her shoulder to her right and raised her eyebrows. “We hoped we knew.”

He regarded her for a second and then nodded, taking a long sip of coffee. “Your mother told me once that you dated a Lieutenant.”

“Lieutenant Commander,” she corrected.

He raised his eyebrows. “And Josh was okay with that?”

She laughed. “Of course not, but we had agreed to see other people. Once I thought he might have fallen in love with a beautiful feminist who he liked to argue with. I think I flaunted the whole Lieutenant Commander thing in front of him on purpose. At least at first. I wound up having very real feelings for Jack, as Josh had for Amy. Just because you love one person doesn't mean that you stop feeling for everyone else. In some ways I think it made us more vulnerable, because we were always looking for some kind of release of these emotions we had, and we couldn't get that from each other. But in the end, it never felt the same, and none of our other interests or relationships worked out. In the end we were always waiting for each other.”

Across the table she thought she saw a glimmer of awe and sadness in his brown eyes. She found herself pulled to him like she had been so many years ago, desperate to have him notice her, be proud of her, and love her. She thought she saw the same desperation flicker across his features, but it was hard to tell. There was an overwhelming hollowness to his entire being, and she was reluctant to invest herself in exploring those caverns of uncertainty. And then a moment later it was gone, and he was back to his somewhat smug, practical self.

“What I don't understand is why you didn't quit. You could have been together.”

“Yeah, well, you wouldn't understand that, because there was honor and loyalty in choosing to stay.” She spoke the words without thinking and regretted them instantly. “I'm sorry,” she amended. “That was rude, I didn't mean...”

“Yes you did. It's fine.” She bit her lower lip and watched his face. He nodded. “It's fine. Forget it.”

She gave a sad smile and tried to lighten the mood. “In the end, I did quit,” she admitted with a shrug. “In that final year of Bartlett's presidency, after eight years by his side, I quit.”

He raised his eyebrow. “Finally,” he said. “The rest of the story begins.”

* * *

Eight years is a really long time to be doing something for the wrong reasons. When I had started the journey I was on, it had been because I was looking for something to inspire me and I had found it in a speech an unknown New England Governor gave. When I decided to go to Nashua I had no way of knowing what was going to happen, or what the years would hold. How could I have guessed that one decision would lead to a future in the White House? I was a college dropout with a shitty boyfriend and no money, and in a mere year I had my own White House ID badge. Members of Congress knew my name. The President of the United States asked me trivia questions. One of the most powerful men in Washington was trying to get in my pants, and doing a pretty damn good job when he got there. How do you get that and then turn around and say, “I'm sorry, this isn't enough.” It felt like hubris. Every time I thought it, every time I longed to have a title without the word “assist” in it, I felt like I was spearheading my own Greek tragedy and my downfall was one loose lip ahead. 

I would never have left. I would never have left Josh, and I would never have left the President, if Gaza hadn't happened. I would have stayed to the end, and then as soon as it was over I would have found a job that was itself a career and not just a permanent stepping stone. The night before I left for Gaza was the first time I really considered leaving before the Administration's time was over. A friend suggested it, and though I rebuked her at first, the thought stayed with me. When I got back, and I was healthy again, and back on my feet physically and emotionally, I realized I couldn't stay. I had seen too much to spend my time organizing schedules. I had beaten bombs and blood cots and death, and going back to being the same person that I was before all of that became insincere and inauthentic.

The thing about life in Gaza is that it is always in contradiction. It's flat and sandy everywhere and you'd never believe anything could grow out there, but it does. There's rich agricultural fields and ocean coastline, and life is the most valuable and negotiable commodity they have. It's a strip of land, a microcosm of the world with two diametrically opposed ruling groups. Gaza is controlled by the Palestinian National Authority, but its borders are under Israeli control. The people there have a view of the world that is predicated on a constant negotiation between two national identities. The people there have a view of the world that is predicated on the acceptance that violence can and will happen no matter who you are, where you are, or what you're doing. They are just like us. Everyone I met was just like me, but my life was so removed from their's. If my own recognition of the privileges I have for just being born the way I am had made me a glass is half-full kind of a person, then by the time I really experienced Gaza, that same recognition had made me a I'm-just-so-lucky-to-have-a-glass kind of a person. 

When I returned from Gaza, I was eight years older than when I had left Wisconsin. In those eight years, I had become a part of something amazing. I had met Ambassadors and musical icons. I had danced at inaugural balls. I had watched a mother beg me to help pardon her son, a friend beg me to help pardon her Grandfather. I had been deposed by Grand juries, interviewed by reporters, and warned that bullets with my name on them were waiting for me. I had seen the person I loved shot in the chest. I had become an abortion statistic. I had learned how to love silently. I had learned how to take care of myself. I had been blown up, and stitched back together. If I had, for some reason, walked past the Donna Moss of eight years before, I wouldn't have even noticed her there. 

When I returned from Gaza, I was eight years living in D.C., but when asked, I still said I was from Wisconsin. The past has an amazing capacity to affect the future, but the future isn't fully constituted by it. We have, by chance or free will, the power to see it all differently, to alter our decisions so that new paths appear before us; to choose to leave the past behind us and to step toward a future that is subsequently unknown. We had promised each other to never give away our future to any one else. I decided to interpret that as any one else, other then ourselves. I decided to interpret that as still giving me the freedom to give away my future to myself, to alter our relationship so that new paths would appear for me, to choose to leave behind the part of our past that was predetermining my future. I chose to do something without him, and without consulting him, because it was the right thing to do for me. I chose to leave. I did leave.

And, ironically, I ended up back in New Hampshire. The only difference was this time they were expecting me, and I had a place to be when I got there, and it was mine alone, and it was for a guy who knew nothing of honor, loyalty or duty. 

I never told Josh this, but the first time I walked into my office in the Russell for President campaign headquarters was the first time in eight years that I felt like a whole person. It wasn't about getting away from him, and I guess I never told him how it made me feel because I was afraid he would see it that way. It was about being honest for the first time in a really long time. When I stepped in that room, everything became real. I was really out of the White House. I was really out of Josh's shadow. I was really starting my own career. I was really able to kiss Josh in public the next time I saw him without any repercussions – or at least none to my job security. I felt like Donna Moss. Not someone's girlfriend Donna Moss, or someone's assistant Donna Moss. I was just me, Donnatella Moss. 

The office was a dark brown, and wood lined the floor and the door, and the desk. I breathed in the smell, a kind of musky dampness mixed with the aftersmell of cleaning products and the faintest hint of pine that I imagined was coming from the trees outside the window. The phone rang as I put my box down, and began to gently lift my belongings out and place them on the desk, each with a quiet reference and reminder that this was my office; that I was unpacking my things in my office.

I picked up the phone. “Russell for President.” Those words in my mouth felt like a reckoning, and I was knocked out by the power of them. I could have just as well have been saying “Donna Moss,” for all the freedom I felt, all the sense of independent purpose. It was never for a second that I didn't like working for Josh. It was never for a second that I didn't want to be there or that I wasn't grateful for the opportunities he gave me. It was never about Josh. It was always about me and about the job, and about how I needed my own identity. 

I was in Nashua on my own for a week before I saw or spoke to Josh again. I hadn't been angry with him when I left, but I had been disappointed. I had decided to give him whatever space he needed to deal with me leaving, to try and realize that I had left the job, and not him. The truth is, it didn't really occur to me to be worried. We had been through so much – guns and bombs and beautiful feminists and dashing Lieutenant Commanders. This seemed the least significant obstacle. I had become arrogant in our love. I had become content with loving in silence, and now in distance. I had become naïve enough to think that if we just kept redefining our love to fit the circumstances, it would never go away. 

The day before I saw him is when I first heard that he had left the White House to manage Congressman Santos' campaign. The truth was that I didn't really know how to respond to that, and I was so busy with work that I didn't allow myself time to truly think about. I stored it in the back of my mind along with all the other fears and concerns over Josh that I had been feeling but sublimating since I'd left. 

When an ad runs on TV for a political candidate, there's no way to show in that three minute spot all of the bureaucracy and bullshit that goes into making the ad, but it was my job to deal with all of that backdrop so that we could get the most out of those three minutes. I had spent the morning on the phone with media advisers pitching ideas that ranged from the idiotic to the brilliant but impracticable. I had spent my lunch running numbers, and finally after nine hours of no down time, I had something to take to Will, our campaign manager. 

I stretched my arms lazily above my head as I stood from my desk. I wasn't taking care of myself and my body knew it. I had aches and pains in places that I didn't even know had muscles, and from the combination of coffee and little food, when I stood too quickly, my head would get dizzy and my eyesight blurry. I walked down the hall to Will's office, trying to gain my balance as I went. Exhaustion and dedication had given me tunnel vision and dulled my senses. How else could I explain not seeing him right away? How else could I have walked into a room where he was and not felt him immediately? But that was exactly what happened. 

“I need you to look over these,” I said to Will as I handed over the papers and repressed the urge to yawn. I titled my head to the side to stretch out the neck muscles and out of the corner of my eye saw the outline of someone behind me to the left of Will's desk. I turned, and there was Josh. 

He looked different, and his face was both calm and surprised at the same time in a way that only Josh can do. I've never meant anyone who can make you feel two polar opposite emotions at the same time just by the way he looks at you. I couldn't read anything on his face. Was he angry? Was he happy to see me? Did he miss the West Wing? Did he regret things? Did he still love me?

“Hi,” was all I could voice, and it came out unsteady and uncertain. 

I was looking at him, but he wasn't moving. “Hi,” he returned, and it felt as if we were two strangers meeting for the first time after spending an entirely different lifetime together. 

The silence fell over us on its own accord. I heard Will talking, saying something about media markets and states, but none of it registered with me, and from his expression, I didn't think any of it registered with Josh either. I willed myself to do something. I willed something to happen, but there was only the silence and the uncertainty, and if the air was crackling with energy it was because we had fallen into chaos and no longer connected. 

He turned his attention to Will, and discussed fair campaign practices, and I wanted to pay attention to what was going on. I wanted to do my job and be good at it and be professional, and not be affected by some guy like a school girl. But Josh wasn't some guy, and as long as he was there, I could focus on nothing but the distance between us. When he stopped talking to Will and left the room, I went after him. 

“Can we not make this a thing?” I pleaded with him when I finally caught up with him in the hallway. I noticed that his walk was different, and I wondered if he had left his swagger in the West Wing. There was an uncertainty to him that I couldn't contribute to just being around me. He was less sure of himself, less sure of where he was going, or how he was getting there. When he turned to look at me, I saw it in his eyes as well. They had lost their laughter, their vigor, and they had become tired and heavy. There was no anger in his face. No regret, no disappointment. It was as if any of those emotions were simply too much, too hard to build up the energy to feel. It wasn't that he had turned cold, it was just that he had become complacent. The last day I had seen him, we had eaten breakfast together and I had played along while he sang the Mamas and the Papas, and he was carefree and confident and happy, and now all those things were gone from him. 

I wanted him to push me against the wall and kiss me in front of everyone. I wanted to push him against the wall and kiss the happiness back into him. We could do that, we could finally do it, and maybe Will would care because Josh was working for Congressman Santos, but he couldn't stop us, and none of the staffers in the hallway could bat an eyelash at us. We could just be two people in love. We could just be a guy and a girl with obnoxious public displays of affection. A part of me still wanted that so much, even though in his eyes I saw that it wasn't going to happen. 

“It's not a thing,” he said to me, and the only emotion I could sense in his voice was a slight hint of confusion, like he wasn't sure why I had bothered to say anything in the first place. It wasn't a thing. He walked away and I watched him, heart broken.

I couldn't sleep, so I stayed at the office the whole night and finished more work than I had even been assigned. When I could no longer find anything to occupy my time, and the sun had risen enough to justify it being morning, I grabbed my coat and walked out onto the Nashua streets. 

It was both surprising and not that the city hadn't changed at all since I had been there eight years before. Russell's campaign headquarters was a street over from the store that had served as Bartlett's office. It was in a large, impressive building with ten times the space that Bartlett;s headquarters had had, but none of the comfort. I walked toward Main St., toward the old headquarters. There were no banners this time to call to me, but I would have recognized the place anywhere. It had become an office supply store, and instead of haphazard desks with loose paper around there were neat precise rows of shelves with paper collected and bound together in plastic wrapping. I considered going inside, but I knew that none of the smells I remembered would be there, and none of the people, and none of the memories, and I didn't want to risk losing them, so I turned and headed down the street. 

Three blocks down the road was the same old diner, still promising the best french toast in the state. I longed to be hungry enough to go in and order a plate, but I wasn't. I hadn't eaten anything substantial in weeks, and I hadn't been hungry since I woke up in Germany. I shrugged as I thought about it, and peered into the diner at the early morning patrons sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. In the corner was the booth I had sat in with Josh, on a day a lifetime ago where he followed me around helping me decide whether to have an abortion or not. To my own surprise I found the memory painful, and turned and walked away. 

My steps became pointed, heading in a direction on their own, and though I should have been surprised when they stopped, I wasn't. The Nashua Symphony Association building had been renovated with a new sign and fresh paint. I pulled the glass door open and stepped into the lobby. I looked around, but there wasn't anyone sitting at the desk up front, and there wasn't anyone in ticket booth. I worried slightly as to whether I should be there, whether I should wait for someone to come by and tell me it was okay to come in, but after a few minutes no one did. So I made up my mind and walked through the lobby and to the double doors that lead into the auditorium. It was not even yet 8:00 in the morning.

I had remembered the auditorium being smaller than it was. I guessed that the first time I hadn't noticed the balcony or just how far the rows went in the back and wide at the edges. I had, in my defense, been preoccupied with other thoughts and other feelings. I did remembered how red everything was, from the carpet to the curtains to the chairs themselves. My eyes scanned across the sea of empty chairs, and landed on the one that was in use.

I walked as quietly and as a gently as I could, so that he wouldn't hear me until I reached him, half way down the aisle in a middle seat. His head was thrown back against the chair and his eyes were closed. If I hadn't known him well I would have mistaken it for sleeping. But I knew him better than anyone else even when there was a gulf of distance between us, and I knew he was lost, and that he was sitting there trying to remember what was important and what was not. 

I took the seat next to him and looked out on the stage. He didn't move. I had the feelings of deja vu slip over me, and marinate the moment. I wondered if things would have been different if I had waited to leave. If I had acquiesced to his wishes to postpone our talk to the next day, if he had bothered to tell me that he was considering leaving to work for Congressman Santos. I wondered if things would have been different if I had told him where was going, who I was going to work for. I wondered if he would have wanted to know, or if leaving was just leaving and it didn't matter. I had no answers.

“Would you have wanted to know?” I asked him.

He leaned his head up and opened his eyes in surprise. “Did you just get here?” I shrugged. “I didn't hear you.”

“I said...”

“No, I mean, I didn't hear you sit down.” I shrugged again, and then I thought the same thing I had eight years before, what did it matter when I had sat down next to him? I had.

I started to repeat the question. “Would you...”

“No.” He said flatly looking out at the stage. “No.” I didn't say anything and after awhile he turned to me and said. “Leaving is leaving, Donna.”

I stared at him. Had this become the theme of our relationship? Had I become the character who was always leaving and he the character who was always being left behind? It wasn't really like that, if you looked closer, if you understood why I made the choices I did, it was never about leaving him. But perhaps on the surface, that was what he saw, and it was what lingered between us. I was no different from Joanie or his dad or Hoynes – I was one more person who had left him. 

“I didn't leave you,” I said in a small quiet voice. “I left the job.”

“You left me when you took off to New Hampshire without so much as a phone call.”

“I tried to talk to you Josh. I tried to talk to you for weeks, you just didn't want to listen.”

He glared at me. “So this is my fault?”

I sighed with frustration and shook my head at him. “There's no 'this',” I said with annoyance. “There's nothing for either of us to be at fault about. We've been distant for a week, we'll get through it.”

He rolled his eyes and smirked. “Is that really what you think? You think nothing's wrong? You think well, hey I'm here and you're here and now that you don't work for me anymore, we can start making out in public and declaring our love to the world, and we're just gonna overlook the way you abandoned me and how fucking torn up I've been about it?”

His words were bitter, and they cut me deeply. “I didn't say that. I didn't think that,” I mumbled weakly.

“I don't think you thought about me at all.”

“You are all I think about. For eight years, you have been all I think about it. I made one decision for myself, and you act like that negates eight years of making decisions for you. I make one choice for myself and suddenly I don't care about you?”

“Don't do that,” he glared. 

“What? Don't do what?”

“Don't act like the past eight years have been nothing but torture and sacrifice and deprivation for you. Don't act like you've been some kind of martyr suffering for your man.”

I bit my lip and nodded. “You're right, I'm sorry. But you have to understand why this decision was important to me. You have to understand that I needed to move on from that job, that I needed to move on from that job for awhile.”

He looked down at his hands, and ran them along his tan pants. “I just wanted you to tell me. I just wanted you to include me in making that decision.”

“I tried, Josh. I tried to. But I couldn't wait around for it to become convenient for you. I had to make a decision.”

“Then why didn't you call after you left?”

“Me? Why didn't you call? You knew where I was. My cellphone number hasn't changed. You didn't bother to call, you didn't bother to come after me.”

He turned and furrowed his brow at me, and I could see the anger building in his eyes again. “If this was some kind of test, some kind of trick to get me to chase after you, then I'm sorry Donna, but I'm not that kind of guy you can manipulate by toying with my emotions.”

I gasped in surprise. “You asshole,” I nearly yelled. “This wasn't a cry for your attention. I have never been that way with you, so don't project your other relationship bullshit onto me. God, this decision was about me. Why can't you see that as important? Why is it not okay that I decided to do something for myself?”

“Because we've been in this together!” he shouted. “Because we promised each other forever, and I thought we meant it.”

“I did mean it!” I shouted back. “I still mean it.”

“Then act like it!” 

I stared at him, my mouth agape and my mind shattered. I felt such sadness and anger and resoluteness all at once that it was paralyzing. Eight years is a long time to be doing something for the wrong reasons. And in that moment, it all became too much – Mandy and the campaign and the presidency and the gun shots and car bombs and the feminists and the Lieutenant Commanders and the anger and the frustration and the uncertainty and all the lies we told each other to get through it. 

I turned and looked at him, and his eyes were pleading with me, and his leg was pressed against mine and he felt so good and so wrong all at once. And I was most saddened to realize that I had let us both down. When I spoke, my voice was low and unsteady and it cracked half way through. “I can't.”

I saw tears pooling in his eyes and confusion take over his face. “You can't?”

I shook my head slowly. “I can't act like it anymore.”

His voice was as weak as mine and he moved his hand from his own thigh to mine. “I don't understand.”

The tears began to flow down my face, but they came silently, like they always did. “I can't keep up the act anymore. Eight years was too long, and things got too hard, and I don't have the strength to do it anymore.”

In his eyes I knew he understood what I was saying, but something in him refused to acknowledge it. “I don't understand,” he kept saying. “We've come this far. We got through so much.”

“No we didn't,” I confessed. “You were right. We asked too much of each other. How could we really sit back and watch each other date other people? You called me from Amy's bed, and that sick feeling in my stomach still hasn't gone away. I lied to you to protect Jack and that guilt still wears me down. I spent years after you were shot with the fear that you would die and I would have no claim on you. The guy I was sleeping with showed up in Germany while you sat at my bedside. You can't tell me you were okay with that, that you could get through it.”

He looked away and bit his lip. “But we love each other,” he whispered. 

“Do we?” I asked, and when he turned back to look at me I shrugged, because the truth was I really wasn't sure anymore. “Maybe we love the idea of us,” I said with uncertainty. “We've only spent five nights together in the past eight years, and we've never really been a couple. We've never had to go through the hoops and the drama and the hard day to day stuff that real couples do. How do we know that if we were finally allowed to be together, we'd really want it? Maybe a part of us thought it was a great love because it was forbidden.” I put my hand over his and squeezed it. “We idolized it, Josh. We put it on a pedastool, and we never really examined it.”

He stared at me for a long time after I had spoken. Even in the face of everything, I still liked the way he looked at me, like he was holding me up with his eyes. He was still the one person who I would have let look at me for the rest of my life. And as I thought that, it occurred to me that maybe that was love. But if it was, then why was I relieved when he finally nodded in agreement?

He reached a hand over and caught a tear on my cheek, but it was immediately replaced by another. “So, is this is it? Is this you breaking up with me?”

I sniffled. “We were never really together.”

He narrowed his features and gave me a sad smile as if I was being inane on purpose. “Now don't be cruel about it. Don't say things that aren't true just to make this easier.” I smiled at the way he spoke to me like I was some kind of errant child who was too silly for her own good. It made me cry harder. How could we be okay enough to smile about this? He reached over and caught another tear. “You're the only person I know who cries without crying,” he whispered, his face close to my own. I leaned forward and rested my head against his. He ran a hand through my hair. “I don't want this,” he whispered after awhile.

“What do you want?” I whispered back.

He leaned back and I looked up into his eyes. “I want this to work. I want us to be together. I want you to quit and come work for Santos. I want to do this thing together.”

I pulled back far away from him and shook my head. “It's that simple for you, huh?” I asked with hurt and sarcasm behind my words. “This can work if I quit my job. This can work if you get what you want.” He looked at me like a wounded animal, and not a very smart one at that. “I like my job, Josh. I like what I'm doing.”

He opened his mouth in shock. “But Russell's a hack!”

“Oh, christ. First of all, this isn't about Russell, it's about me. I could have gotten a job anywhere and we'd still be having this conversation because you can't handle not having your trusty lapdog there for whatever you need when ever you want. And second of all...no, there is no second of all, he's the Vice President. I don't care if he is a hack.”

“So you'll just go follow him around the country, one more gomer for you put all your faith into, when he's just going to let you down like all the rest of them.”

I glared at him. “I hope you're including yourself in that list of men who've let me down, because right now you're winning the jackass cook off.”

He laughed sadistically and smirked at me. “We both know I'm the only real guy in your life, Donnatella Moss. We both know you've never trusted any guy the way you've trusted me, and you can tell yourself whatever you need to, but I am, and I always will be, the only real thing you've got.”

“What you are isn't real, Josh. What you are is a fantasy I made up eight years ago when I got a stupid crush on my boss.”

He bit his lower lip and looked at me like I had just gutted his stomach with a Swiss Army knife. “Why are you doing this?”

I sighed and slumped into the chair. “When I left Wisconsin,” I began in a calm voice. “It was because I hated who I had become with David. I had thought we were in it for the long haul, and I set aside my education, and my career and my desires so that he could get where he wanted to go. And I didn't mind at first because we were together, and I thought what was good for him was good for me. I thought it was just a matter of time, and once that time was up, I would be able to return to my education and my career and my desires. But two years passed and I became a shadow of the person I had been. It became all about him, and none about me. So I left. I found something that inspired me, and that I thought I could do well and that I wanted, and went for it.” I looked over at him and gave him a sad smile. “In my whole life I will never be more grateful for anything than I am for the opportunity that you gave me that day I showed up in your office. But, over the years...Josh, I substituted one guy's dreams for another's, and I lost myself in that.” He opened his mouth to protest, but I reached a hand over and took his to still him. “I'm not even coming close to comparing you to David, honest. It's not what I mean, okay. I'm just saying that in the past year, I've started to feel the same way I did then, because I keep pushing aside my career and my desires to stay with you. And I can't do it anymore because it's not fair to me, and because if I keep doing it, I'm going to start to resent you for it.”

He pulled his hand away from me, but not out of anger. With a frustrated sigh he ran it through his hair, and then let it fall to his side. He looked off at the stage and I could see that he was thinking, taking it all in, maybe even formulating a response, but one didn't come. In the end he just turned to me and in a sad but simple voice said, “I want you to be happy, Donna.”  
  


I wiped my own tears away this time. “I have to figure out who I am without you,” I tried to explain. 

He nodded and smiled sweetly at me. “Then go, go find what you need.”

My heart was so completely full of him and so completely broken at the same time that I was sure I was never going to heal properly. I leaned over and threw my arms around him, and his arms went around me. We held each other, and I felt my shoulder grow damp with his tears. It tore me up inside, but things had become what they had become, and there was no way I could take any of it back now, and no way that taking it back would change things. I released him and stood up from my seat. There was so much I wanted to tell him about how he made me feel and how he changed my life and how I wasn't ever going to get over him, but in the end I only mustered the strength to say a broken, “Good-bye Joshua Lyman.”

He smiled sweetly for the second time and echoed my words. “Good-bye Donnatella Moss.” He stood up but made no inclination to move, so I gave him a brief smile and turned away from him. 

I began the slow process of walking away from Josh Lyman, putting one foot in front of the other until by virtue of biological mechanics I was headed up the aisle toward the double-doors that lead out of the auditorium into the rest of the world. I was getting used to walking when I heard him call after me one last time. 

“Donna!” I turned and looked at him. He was standing in the same spot, in front of the chairs where we had just said goodbye. “I just...” he began, but for once, words were hard for him to find. “I just...I want...” He took a deep breath and then looked firmly at me. “Don't ever think that I didn't love you through all of this. I did. I still do.”

I smiled through new tears and nodded. It was all I had the energy or will to do. Then I turned, opened the double doors and walked through.

* * *

“I'll take that,” she said instinctively when the waiter put the check down in front them. 

“No, no,” he said from across the table. “Donna, please, I asked you to dinner, let me get this.”

She hesitated. She knew it was proper manners to not fight over a bill, and she wouldn't have normally, but this was different. The truth was that she just wasn't comfortable with the idea of him paying. It made her feel beholden to him somehow, and she wanted to make it clear that she had long ago given up hope of recievinganything from him. “Really,” she said, “It's fine. I'd like to.”

He had already grabbed the thin piece of paper and placed in front of him out of his reach. “Donna.” He said her name curtly like that was the end of the discussion, and proceeded to pull out his wallet. She watched him as he flipped it open, looked through pockets and pulled out a credit card. She wondered if he was the kind of a person who carried pictures in his wallet, and if so were there any of her? Were there ever any of her? Did he ever take his wallet out in front of friends and say “look at this, look at this picture, this is my Donna”? Did she ever have a place there among his IDs and personal information?

The waiter smiled thinly and accepted the credit card and check and then walked off. The discussion was over now, and she was both glad and frustrated. Maybe she could give him this one thing she thought. It didn't have to mean more than dinner. It didn't have to mean anything other than food.

When she turned her attention back to him, he was looking at her expectantly. “That's not how it ends, is it?” he asked. 

She looked down at her hand at the thin gold watch around her wrist. “It's getting late.”

He considered her for a moment and then to her surprise nodded. “Yes, it is. I've kept you long.” He ran his hand through his hair and then smiled hopefully. “I don't suppose you'd like to get a drink maybe, or go for a walk, or something?”

She hesitated. At one time she would have loved the idea of spending more time with him, but she wasn't sure. It was a strange sitting there for all those hours telling him this so very personal story of hers. She thought maybe things would be different this time if she agreed, if she reached out to him. But her hesitation grew and in the end she decided against it. “I can't. We have this thing in the morning we have to go to, and we really need to get home.”

“Are you sure? Just one drink.”

She shook her head. “I don't even drink,” she explained.

He furrowed his brow. “I didn't know, I just assumed.” She shrugged her shoulders in response. “Well,” he said after awhile. “Can you at least tell me...I mean, would you mind...”

She smiled shyly and nodded. “No, that's not how it ended. There were months of campaigning still to go.”

* * *

The thing about losing your heart is that you learn it's not really a necessary organ – not like they tell you it is. You can get by without it. You can get up in the morning and shower and brush you teeth and even get dressed. And you can go to work, and you can wrangle money from donors and you can visit romantic places like Charleston, SC and you can travel on planes and in cars and you can go to sleep at night and then get up and do it all again the next day. You can get by without your heart. It's just that you won't want to. You won't want to do any of those things, and in the end, you only do them because your brain wins out – because you mentally force yourself to do them. The thing about losing your heart is that you learn it's not really a necessary organ, but it's the only one that matters.

There were times in those eight years were I felt really alone. When Josh was with Amy I felt a loneliness that nagged at me incessantly. When I had weekends away from the office and no one to spend them with, I felt alone and sad. But none of those times compared to the way I felt after that day in Nashua. I threw myself into my job in hopes of quelling the feelings. I worked long hours, tried to develop a friendship with Will that might ease the passage of time, but nothing helped. If my plan had been to find myself, I was finding myself to be an incredibly sad person. I started to think it was all a mistake, that I had ruined the only good thing in my life, and that I would never get it back. I started to grow cold and distant. My sense of humor moved from quirky to bitter. My sense of purpose turned from career to crusade. I didn't believe in Russell but I lobbied for him like a lioness for her cubs. I put so much of my efforts into becoming a strong confident woman that I stopped being a caring, warm, understanding person. Or as Josh liked to tell me, I stopped bringing the funny.

Which isn't to say that one leads to the other. It certainly wasn't that I couldn't be strong and independent and warm and understanding at the same time. I hadn't fallen into some feminist backlash stereotype of a woman who wanted a career and lost the chance to have real love as a result. I wasn't about to show up in Josh's hotel room having boiled a bunny. It was instead that I had had my heart broken. I had one image of my future, and now it was gone, and I was trying desperately to get back on track, but it was really hard, and it had nothing to do with me being a woman. It had everything to do with me being in love with someone I couldn't be with or even turn to.

It was a Wednesday the next time I saw him, and I was exhausted from a trip in the South. I had only wanted to go to bed, to fall asleep and forget about pulled pork and big hats and men who called me “little lady,” and said it was cute when I made coherent arguments. I lugged my bag through the hotel and was relieved when I finally found the elevator and was safe inside it, that much closer to a room of my own. I should have recognized his voice when I heard it, but the truth was I was so tired I didn't even think it was real. I didn't think he was really there, until his hand was pushing the door back open and his eyes were staring wildly into mine.

He was talking on the phone, but his voice lost its rhythm when the doors closed, and we were alone on the elevator. I remember thinking he must be getting really good reception. My phone never worked in elevators. But he ended the call quickly, and my thoughts returned to the uncomfortable tension between us. “I, um, I couldn't find the button,” I mumbled, “for the door. Sorry.”

He hesitated and I had the feeling that we were in some bad Outer Limits episode where we'd be forced to ride this elevator alone for the rest of our lives. “Can you press 4?” he asked.

I raised an eyebrow. “It's already pressed,” I said slowly, pointing to the control panel where 4 was the only lit number. He made a confused face and then turned away to the look at the door. I hated how awkward things had become between us. I started to pray that the elevator would hurry, hurry up and get there and open the doors so I could start breathing again. I started to feel my stomach sink. How did we get here, that I would be so uncomfortable just riding an elevator with him?

When the doors opened I exhaled. I don't know if he heard me. I walked out, and my steps where like our conversation – hesitant, uncertain, and uncomfortable. I took them, but faltered when I realized his were heading the same way. He asked me something about South Carolina as we walked, and I mumbled something in response. I remember thinking it was inane. When I reached my door, he turned and tried to open the one across the hall. I thought all I want is to get in my room and end this day. I also thought all I want is to get in his room and end this pain.

I said “Good night,” and started to go when I realized he still couldn't get his door open. Something about it made me smile. In my mind I flashed back like a newsreel to all the hotels in all the cities where I had to take his card and slide it in to the door for him. He made a joke about frequent flyer mileage, but I ignored it, because he was just covering his embarrassment, and I was too lost in memories I thought I had left behind in that Nashua auditorium to say something meaningless to him. 

I looked at him one last time and then went into my room, laid on the bed and cried myself silently to sleep. 

I don't want to turn it into some kind of melodrama. We weren't those people. We didn't sulk or get drunk, or sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. We were more like mutual workaholics. I threw myself into work, and from what I could tell on the other end of the campaign trail he did the same. The strangest part wasn't being on my own or even being away from him physically, it was not knowing at any point in time what he was feeling, or thinking, or what he was going through. No campaign is easy, but Russell had the money and the support and political credibility and visibility that Congressman Santos lacked. I did my job and I did it well, but I did it while worrying about Josh. 

We passed each other in the months ahead, and looks and hello's got easier and more comfortable, but I don't think we ever really got used to being apart. We were used to hiding how we felt, just not hiding it from each other. I had always carried around with me the comfort that I was a woman in love and a woman who someone else loved. I had always carried around our love like a compass, pointing true north, guiding me in both my decisions and in where my home was. Now my compass was off, as if it had become demagnetized accidentally in a lightening storm, and I couldn't figure out which way it was pointing me, and I couldn't figure out which way I wanted to go, and I couldn't find my way home. Still I carried with me, because it was my compass, and how could I not?

By the time the Convention came around I had reached two conclusions. First, even though it was in fact my job to see that it happened, I did not want Vice President Bob Russell to win the democratic nomination. He was, to borrow the term, a hack. And second, I knew who I was. I was Donnatella Moss, and I was smart and strong and confident and, the thing is, I had always been that person it had just been me that lost sight of her. There was a third conclusion, but I was neither as resolved nor resilient in proferring it. I did however have every intention of broaching its validity.

Something in Josh had changed from those days in Nashua and Iowa. The better the Santos campaign did, the more the color returned to his face and the swagger to his step. We were becoming again the people we had been when we fell in love, and I developed a naïve but exciting belief that we could come back to each other and fall in love all over again. I watched from the corner of my eye for three days of running and counting delegates and breaking scandals and lectures by Leo and everything else that made up the Democratic National Convention. I worked hard, diligently, passionately, but I was spurred on by the sight of a fully restored Joshua Lyman, in white button down shirts with short spiky hair. My passion derived from the sigh of him, but I diverted it from him to my work. 

In the end, Congressman's Santos's speech was a reckoning. Listening to him in a hotel conference room, watching Will's reaction, noticing the way the phone calls began to taper, I knew then what was made clear hours later. When the phone banks were dry, and even Will could not muster the energy to do much but sit and stare at the blank TV screen, I snuck out of the conference room we had commandeered for the Russell campaign and walked out to the main floor. 

The Convention floor was loud, filled with people, and streamers and balloons and hats. Red and white and blue painted every inch of the room and the people in it. It reminded me of going to the circus when I was child, and how I had been in awe with the colors and magic of it all. I leaned against a tall column and sighed, watching the people walk around and talk, some cheering, some eating, but everybody doing something, except me. I stood perfectly still, my hands folded across my chest, and the sounds of music falling over me as I watched the world move around me. 

There were hundreds of people in the room, and yet above it all I could make out the sounds of a sad song I recognized from a cd one of the staffers had been listening to. Something about it was so sad and poignant that it had stayed with me even though at the time she had played it, I had only taken a passing interest. I recalled that the artist was Mindy Smith, that her album had a sepia color to it, like old records I imagined my grandparents listened to. I'd never taken my emotional cues from songs or films or books before. I was my own person, but when she sang those first words, about being the kind of person who rarely took chances, but something in your eyes is saying you can ease my heartache, I felt sucker punched, and I longed for Josh.

I have tried to will the world to my desires. To will good to come out of bad, to will happiness to enter where it needs, and I have never had the power to make something happen just because I wanted it. Until that moment. I don't know if it was magic, or if it was love, or if there really is no difference between the two, but I was in a room with hundreds of people and when the sad words of a sad song made me lift my head and look across the room, somehow there was, standing on the other side looking at me, the only person I ever wanted to be in a room with.

We looked at each other and the singer sang about how hard life is and how the little things can save you today, and I suspected for a selfish second that the song was written about us. That together we had willed it into existence in this time and place because we otherwise didn't know what to say to each other. He started to walk towards me, but I wanted to watch him more, so I held up my hand and he stopped.

In my pocket was my cellphone, and he was still the first number on my speed dial. I watched him pull his own phone out, flip it open and put it to his ear. “Hi,” he breathed into the phone.

“Hi,” I said smiling across the room at him.

“You okay?”

I nodded. “I like this song,” I said into the phone. “I just want to watch you while I listen to it.” He didn't respond, but I saw him smile and he stayed where he was and we stared at each other, standing a room apart with our phones to our ears. “I like looking at you,” I confessed in a low voice.

I heard his breathing deepen. “I love looking at you,” he responded. “I'm always doing it.”

I leaned back into the column behind me to keep me balanced. The airy way he spoke, the deep sultry voice he was using was like a series of wanton caresses against my skin, and I was getting heady with desire. “I've always like the way you look me,” I said keeping my eyes on his. “I never liked other people to look at me, but I would let you for the rest of our lives if you wanted.”

He hesitated. “What do you want?” he asked, but his voice was pleading.

“I want this to be over.”

He raised an eyebrow. “It is over. I just talked to Leo, the announcement is going to be any minute now, that's why I came out here.”

“I wasn't talking about the Convention.”

He smiled wickedly. “I know you weren't.” I threw him an annoyed smile. “But I want to be clear on something.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I want it to be clear that the Convention's offer, that we have a nominee, and that you and I are no longer working for opposite teams. I want to be clear that we are no longer rivals. We are no longer boss and assistant. I want to be clear that right now, in these moments, you and I have absolutely no relationship toward each other that has anything to do with politics.”

My smile brightened. “So what are we, Josh?”

He spoke slowly but clearly. “We are just a guy and a girl.”

The music was fading and I only noticed because I no longer wanted to look at him from far away. “I want you to know something too,” I said to him, as I leaned away from the column and took a tentative step forward toward him. 

He took a step to match my own. “What is that, Donnatella?”

I took a deep breath. “I don't want you to think that I didn't love you through all of this,” I confessed, repeating his words back to him, as nervous energy drew me towards him. “I did.”

His smile had faded and uncertainty clouded his face. He took tentative steps, but between the two of us, we were close enough to no longer need the phones. “And do you still?”

The question burned my throat and tears came before I could try to stop them. I inhaled loudly into the phone and nodded weakly. I didn't want him to see me crying, and I didn't want to face the possibility that Joshua Lyman had fallen out of love with me, so I stopped moving and looked down at my feet, waiting to hear his voice on the other end of the phone.

When he spoke it was just my name, “Donna,” and it was clearer than any phone call, and it was accompanied by the feel of his finger on my chin, tilting my head up to look at him through tear stained eyes. He smiled at me, and took my cellphone from my hands, closing it and putting it in his pocket. I noticed he wasn't using his own anymore either. Then he took my face in his hands, rubbing his thumbs across my cheeks to wipe away the tears. He bent his head down close to mine. “Donna,” he whispered my name. “Did you find what you needed?” 

I smiled sadly and apologetically and nodded in response. He smiled back. He leaned closer, and rested his forehead against mine. “You are so beautiful,” he said against my skin. 

I shook in his arms and leaned into him, wrapping my own arms around his waist. “You,” I declared with as much strength as I had in me, “are so wonderful.”

In a room of hundreds of politicians, delegates, key members of the party, staff of the various campaigns, and members of the press, Josh Lyman kissed me like a starving man, and I returned his affections like a dying woman. Our tongues dueled, hot and wet and so inviting and so perfect that I moaned through half of it, a steady low murmur of a moan that made our bodies vibrate all over. His hands moved one to my hair and the other to my back, and mine moved one to his cheek and the other to his hip, and we held on so tightly to each other that letting go became a physical impossibility.

“I am so in love with you,” he whispered between gasps for air, before our mouths returned to each other. And I echoed the sentiment with declarations of love and forever. And when the crowd starting cheering, I forgot all about Santos and Leo and the Convention and politics and decided the applause was just for us, because you couldn't find a better story than ours.

* * *

She looked up and sighed deeply. She raised a hand to her lips and thought that she could still feel Josh's lips against hers, the phantom touch of them, the magic that only they could create together. When she looked across the table, she thought she saw him wipe a tear away from his eyes. 

“I'm inclined to agree,” her dinner companion said after awhile, “that is a great story.”

Donna smiled despite herself. She found herself oddly pleased to have his opinion be so favorable. It was the closest they had ever gotten to receiving his blessing. She turned to her right and saw Josh sitting there with an equally bright smile on his face, and the hint of a tear in his own eyes. She furrowed her brow at him lovingly and reached over to take his hand. 

Josh leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “And you tell it very well, Donnatella,” he whispered to her.

“Well,” their dinner companion said from across the table. “I've taken up too much of your time as is. And I think they're going to be kicking us out soon.” He stood and grabbed his coat from the back of his chair. 

Donna stood as well, suddenly conflicted over what to do. Was she ready to see him go, not knowing if she'd ever see him again? Not knowing if she wanted to ever see him again?

“Your mother said the wedding was beautiful,” he said as he put his coat on. 

“When did you talk to mom?”

He shrugged. “We talk now and then,” he explained. 

Donna didn't know to reconcile that, how her mom could have let him back into her life or how her mom could have shared things about her with him. None of it made any sense to her. She turned to Josh for comfort and found him watching her with a careful but comforting eye. 

“It was nice meeting you Mr. Moss,” Josh said firmly but gallantly as they made their way out of the restaurant. He reached over and shook his hand and then stepped close to Donna so she would feel his support and comfort as resolutely as a he offered it. 

“It was nice meeting you too Josh. I'm glad to know that my daughter has someone like you in her life.” Then he turned to her and his face was sad and distant. “Donna...I...” he tripped over his words and she ached for him to just say something. 

She wanted him to say he was sorry, sorry for leaving her and her mom when she was only nine. Sorry for running out on them without a word or an explanation, for never being there for her, for forgetting birthdays and school plays and every major event in her life, for making her doubt herself, for teaching her what it felt like to be scared and alone. Sorry for not trying to be a part of her life until now, now when he was old and broken and she was finally whole again. She wanted him to say he would do anything to go back and change it all, to be a real father to her, to be a positive influence on her life. She wanted him to just say something to make it all better even though she had no idea what that something could be. 

In the end he squared his shoulders and said, “I want to thank you for agreeing to see me. I didn't deserve it, but it meant a lot to me.”

She hesitated. “It was good to see you, Dad.” She started to step away from him, and then slowly added, “Take care of yourself.”

He smiled. “You too, Donna. If you ever need anything, well...” he smiled sheepishly, “You have my number now.” 

She smiled back and he hesitated for another second before turning and walking out of the restaurant and down the street. She stared out the glass doors and watched him go. 

“You okay?” Josh asked from behind her, his hands on her shoulders and his head close to her cheek. 

She nodded. “I'm tired, though, and I little nauseated.”

He smiled and kissed her cheek as his hand gently caressed her stomach. “We should get home.” He took her hand in his and opened the door for them. The car wasn't far away and the walk was pleasant. He held her close, his arm around her waist, his hand rubbing the small of her back. “There was a lot of the story you didn't tell,” he commented as they walked.

She smiled at him. “Like what?”

He shrugged. “You didn't mention Cliff.”

“We agreed not to talk to him, specifically the part were I lied to the grand jury.”

“Good point. What about the MS scandal, or that night in California in my hotel room, or my hand through a window or your recovery after Germany?”

“Those are our things, Josh. He didn't need to hear the whole story. I didn't want him to hear it all.”

He reached the car and pressed her against it. “He's your father, Donna.”

She shook her head. “You had a father, Josh. I had some guy who gave me a name and then taught me how to stop trusting people.”

“Then why did you agree to meet him, after all this time?”

She shrugged. “I'm not really sure. I kept thinking that very thing the whole night. I guess a part of me wanted to believe things could be different. And a part of me needed to make peace with my family so that I can really be a part of yours.”

He watched her face and then nodded. “I'm sorry,” he whispered and bent down and kissed her on the forehead. He looked back at her and smiled. “I like hearing the story of us, but...” he sighed.

“But what?” she asked, running her hands up and down his arms.

“Some it makes me really sad. Doesn't it make you sad?”

She pursed her lips and then shook her head. “It might, but then I think, how do we know if any of those moments had turned out differently that we would end up here? And I would be even sadder if we had never ended here.”

He smiled sweetly at her. “I thought maybe talking about what happened in Nashua eight years ago might upset you, you know, considering.”

She took in his words and the concern they carried. It occurred to her that this was another one of the personal things that didn't get discussed when politicians lobbied for or against abortion rights. That abrotion isn't a simple act with set recovery times, that instead it was a one of the decisions that alters the path of your life entirely, and you never really make it back to the original trail you were on, but it's all right because if you did find your way back, it wouldn't lead anywhere you needed to go. She had become a statistic but it was more than that, she had made a decision that no one should have to make but everyone should have the right to choose. It had made her who she was. It had made them who they were. It had the made future what it was. And she could not regret any of that. 

She smiled at him. “It was fine. It was actually good to talk about, to explain how I felt and why I made the decision I did.”

He nodded. “Did I really make you sad that day when I talked about my dad?” he asked sheepishly.

She laughed at him and his nervous face. “You didn't mean to,” she reassurred him. “How could you have known that my own father abandoned me.” Her voice hitched as she spoke the words and she had to lean back onto the car to let it sink in. She suddenly understood exactly why she had agreed to met her father that night. “Josh?” she asked nervously. 

“Hmm?”

“Will you promise me something?”

He looked at her, took in her nervous eyes, her unsteady tone and the way her hand was absentmindedly rubbing her belly, and he knew what she wanted to ask. “We're not going to be like that, Donna. I'm not going to be like him. I'm not going to miss one second of our family, okay?”

She smiled brightly and nodded. “Okay,” she agreed with vigor. 

He kissed her lightly on the mouth and then bent down so his face was level with her belly. “Did you hear that baby Lyman?” he called through her sweater.

She laughed. “Baby Moss,” she corrected.

“Baby Moss-Lyman,” he conceded. “Did you hear me?” he repeated to her stomach. “I'm never going to leave you. I already love you beyond comparison, and I love your mother beyond reason, and you are both stuck with me for the rest of your lives, and probably some after that too.” He leaned forward and kissed her stomach. “Here's hoping you get your mother's eyes.”

Despite herself she giggled like a school girl, and he stood up and smiled brightly at the effect he had on her. She put her hand over the spot where he had kissed her and their unborn child. “Here's hoping you get your father's hair.”

He looked at her with awe and amazement. “You are beautiful.”

She ran her hands around his waist and leaned into him. “You are wonderful.”

END


End file.
